The Cosplay in America series of books are examination by photographer Ejen Chuang of the cosplay scene in America. Starting in 2008, Chuang traveled through the country setting up his photo set-up, photographing over a thousand cosplayers. The result is Cosplay in America(2010) in which Boing Boing proclaim “Chuang did what I hope more people will do in the future, portrayed cosplay as art.”
In 2012 Chuang successfully Kickstarted a longer project visiting twenty cities in the United States and returning in 2015 with Cosplay in America V2. In 2018-2019, Chuang turns his lens back to fifty or so cosplayers he originally photographed from the first book. With a over a decade under their belts, cosplayers examine how the hobby has impacted their lives.
The third book’s Kickstarter is to run in 2025 with the projected book release is the Fall of 2025.
COSPLAY IN AMERICA V2 (2015)
A lush combination of portraiture and documentary photography, Cosplay in America Volume 2 takes us on a tour of fan conventions across the nation—from Comic-Con International in San Diego and Los Angeles’s Anime Expo to Dragon Con in Atlanta and New York Comic Con—in celebration of the pastime of cosplay. The act of dressing up as characters from movies, manga, video games, and anime can require hundreds of hours of preparation and painstaking attention to detail, and with five hundred conferences per year in the United States attended by a dedicated community, the line between hobby and lifestyle blurs. Essays by Andrea Letamendi and Liz Ohanesian deepen our understanding of this transformative subculture.
COSPLAY IN AMERICA (2010)
In the past decade, cosplay has exploded in popularity here in the United States. Walk into any anime convention in America and you’ll see fans dressing as their favorite characters from anime, manga, or video games. In 2009, photographer Ejen Chuang travelled to six anime conventions across America to capture this phenomenon. Five months were spent photographing 1,651 cosplayers from coast to coast followed by another six months of editing. The result is a hard bound coffee table book of cosplayers captured at the conventions. Through these pages one can see the many faces of Americans – of different race, background, and age all united under the love of anime