Photographer Thomas Peter recently published a project at Reuters on the Japanese minimalist movement. There are some interesting photos there, even though the project as such suffers from “explainitis“. That means, the photos hardly hold their own without the text.
What intrigued me, though, was the movement itself: people reducing their belongings to 100 items. I find it fascinating how certain ideas (good and bad ones) cross centuries and cultures during human history. The “less is more” idea spans from religions (Buddhism, Christianity, St. Francis, Gandhi) to psychoanalysis (Erich Fromm: To Have or to Be). Curiously, modern minimalism seems to have circulated from Zen Buddhism to Steven Jobs and from him back to Japan…
(more…)
