Smart Peninsula started in the back room of a shared office in Noge, Yokohama, in the spring of 2017. Kenji Murakami had spent the previous six years as a second-unit photographer for a Tokyo-based advertising agency, shooting product catalogues and the occasional campaign under tight deadlines and tighter budgets. The work was good training, but it left almost no room for the kind of careful, considered image-making he had studied under Hiroshi Tanaka at Musashino Art University. He left the agency in February 2017 with one camera bag, a rented strobe kit, and a list of twelve people who had said they might hire him.
01 Kenji shoots every session personally. No associates handed your booking
The first year was instructive in the way that difficult years tend to be. The Noge office was too small for anything beyond headshots, the rented strobes broke twice, and one early commercial client returned the files asking for a style that had nothing to do with what was agreed. Kenji rebuilt the brief from scratch, shot the job again at no charge, and the client has booked every year since. By late 2018 the studio had moved to a proper ground-floor space in Kanagawa-ku, with a twelve-metre shooting depth, a north-facing skylight, and enough room for a small prop library. The work shifted from reactive to deliberate.
02 Studio closed first Monday of each month for calibration and maintenance
03 RAW files archived for three years after delivery, two drives plus cloud
04 Maximum four participants per workshop. Not a lecture, a working session
Kenji Murakami studied photography at Musashino Art University, graduating in 2010 with a focus on documentary and still-life work. He spent six years as a second-unit photographer at a Tokyo advertising agency, where he shot product catalogues, retail campaigns, and occasional editorial work for clients across the Kanto region. In 2017 he left to found Smart Peninsula in Yokohama, starting from a rented back room in Noge before moving to the current Kanagawa-ku studio in late 2018. He calibrates his own monitors, maintains his own equipment, and has not missed a shoot due to gear failure since the studio opened. Outside the studio, he collects pre-war Japanese woodblock prints and walks the Miura Peninsula coastline most Sunday mornings.