Olele Olala

Olele Olala is Kishin Shinoyama's document of Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, made on assignment for the Japanese edition of Playboy when the photographer was thirty years old.

Issued as a Playboy Special Edition by Shueisha in 1971, the book runs largely in color, its images sequenced by the writer Shōzō Tsurumoto into a photographic travelogue with a line of text accompanying nearly every picture, capturing the crowds, costumes, and staged theatricality of the Carnival street parades.

Shinoyama, one of postwar Japan's most prolific commercial and fine-art photographers, moved fluidly between fashion, celebrity portraiture, and reportage across a six-decade career; the Rio material was later restaged on film by director Nobuhiko Obayashi, who rephotographed Shinoyama's Carnival pictures on 16mm.