Japan is reputedly the second largest market in Asia after Australia for sales of Elvis music. In Tokyo’s trendy Harajuku district there stands a statue of Elvis, erected by the country’s ex prime minister Junichiro Koizumi, a self described Elvis devotee who shares his birthday with the late singer. The statue sits outside Love Me Tender, a store dedicated to Elvis memorabilia. And not so far away, lovers of the era gathered on a Sunday in August last year for Tokyo Rockabilly Club’s annual Day of Rock N’ Roller.

In an austere concrete car park in the wings of the Ryogoku national sumo wrestling hall in Japan’s capital a group of young boys are preparing for combat. Like oversized ballerinas they squat and pirouette on quaking legs to improve balance and strength and follow it with stamping, thrusting and shuffling, all techniques unique to the sumo ring. When Japan was a rice and fish economy boys could enter stables at age 12, now the age limit is 15. Young wrestlers are drawn to sumo not just for the cultural prestige. At the top sumo commands big money and, like boxing, can be the path to fame and fortune. Sumo wrestlers in the top two divisions can command $80,000 to $100,000 a year and the...

The 1950’s were an exuberant decade that saw the birth of rock’n’roll, new fashions and social mores, and a breakaway generation who were the first to be known as teenagers. At the turn of the 21st century there are some for whom the 1950’s never died. Photographer Steven Siewert has spent years documenting Sydney’s rockabillies, a vibrant subculture who live and breathe an era that, for many, predates their birth. The men dress for cool jeans or suits with slick quiffs, while women wear colorful print dresses by day and dazzling cocktail frocks by night. The term «rockabilly» came into existence in 1956 to describe a style of music that combined rock’n’roll with country or...

This story is above all an aesthetic research. Following thousands of pigeons, released from a trailer truck, seeing them flying to become little black dots at the horizon. Steven Siewert catches those fowls and fix their wings in a delicate black and white.

You could hear them before you could see them, these footsoldiers of John Frum. In clammy equatorial heat, U-S-A scrawled in red paint on bare backs, wearing only blue jeans, they march in step. Soles thud on ground, hands slap on bamboo rifles tipped red for effect. The sound ripples around the rainforest valley at the southern tip of this far flung island of the South Pacific. 'Forward march,' barks the drill sergeant to his soldiers in the local Bislama language. 'Present to the south. Present to the west. . . ' The men follow. It's not quite the ramrod discipline of West Point, but straightbacked enough to be convincing. Screened by the rainforest, in a clearing where pigs roam, they...