“A Yakuza family enters a hotel bar in Niigata. My brother and I have negotiated with them for ten months, and we have been granted permission for me to follow and photograph them for two years.

As they walk in, I watch the extremely subtle social interactions: the micro-expressions on the faces, the gestures, the voices and intonations, the body language, the absolute respect, the criminal element…

As customers silently leave the bar to make room for the Godfather to have a coffee, everything appears to be strictly organized, yet at the same time completely natural: for some reason I don’t need anyone to tell me what to do, where to sit, when to talk or when to shut up. It’s like I can feel the boundaries and the implicit expectations.

It’s hard. It’s scary. I’m slowly learning, little by little trying to understand this Japanese way. But it feels like I’ll never fully comprehend.

Sitting at the table with a bodyguard looking straight through me, I drink my iced coffee. I switch on my camera. It has begun.

I can feel the acute sensation of walking on eggshells.”

Anton Kusters

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Anton Kusters was born in Belgium in 1974.

After obtaining a Master’s degree in Political Philosophy at the University of Louvain, he studied Photography at STUK and at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hasselt, Belgium. In 2001 he started a web and graphic design company.

Anton Kusters’ desire to collaborate with other artists and helping young talent resulted in BURN Magazine, a magazine dedicated to the Emerging Photographer Grant he founded together with David Alan Harvey.

Currently Kusters is working on a long term conceptual project to never forget the Holocaust and its heavens above, and on a documentary project about finding where one belongs.