DIGITAL UP MAGAZINE Julie Watai’s debut photo collection Samurai Girlwas released in 2006, and she has been working hard ever since. Watai’s imagery is filled with gadgets, technology items she obsessively collects. “I get satisfaction from capturing things that I like, or things that I fantasize about. By taking pictures of these things, I somehow gain ownership of them. I do this because I’ll eventually run out of space if I keep collecting actual objects. It’s the same in regards to beauty. When you photograph a pretty girl, you capture that beauty forever, even when it no longer exists.” Her style is unique; she blurs the boundaries between 2D and 3D realms. With heavy usage of image editing, she never depicts too much reality in her artwork. By looking at her photos, we get the sense it is a twodimensional world of manga before our eyes. Most of Julie’s photos feature young girls. She herself often poses, too. Watai then edits photos in order to get rid of too much skin texture and pores in order to make models look like doll-like figures. She takes selfportraits as her body is just another material to work with. Juliee xplains: “I do not see [that] my body belongs to me. This is just material for my work. It worries me that I may lose my childish ways as I get older. I know that I can’t be young forever, which is why I take a lot of self-portraits. I want to keep taking them, and store them on my computer so that I can play with them until I die.” [ 22 ] DigitalUP