Masahito Agake was born in Tokyo in 1969, and works professionally as an architect. In the early 90s Agake began shooting casually while scuba diving, and after coming across the work of Aleksandr Rodchenko and W. Eugene Smith in 1996, he took up photography more seriously. He had his first exhibition at Tokyo’s Place M gallery in 2003, and since then has exhibited his work in different galleries in Tokyo. Most recently he has been exhibiting his work at Third District Gallery in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward.

Please also see a gallery of Agake’s recent work shot in Tokyo and Taiwan.

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Kanako Sasaki was born in Sendai, Japan. She graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from Ithaca College in New York in 2001, and in 2004 received a Master of Fine Arts degree in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York City. She also studied for two years at the Royal College of Art in London.

Since 2001 Sasaki has been exhibiting her work both in her native Japan and abroad and has held an increasing number of solo exhibitions where she shows installations mingling photography and video, in Budapest, Tokyo, New York, amongst others. Her work is focused on older women, in homage to her grandmother who died quite recently. By meeting such people all over the world, she is searching for a universal memory of a bygone time, in order not to lose her own memory. For her, her work is a “celebration of the capacity for survival of universal emotions”.

In 2006 she was selected as one of PDN’s #30 Emerging Photographers to Watch, and in 2008 she won a Shiseido Art Egg Award which is given by the cosmetics giant each year to three up-and-coming artists from various artistic fields.

The above photo comes from Sasaki’s “Ukiyo 1 – The World of Groping” series of portraits which she has been working on since 2006.

Sasaki is currently a resident artist at CENTQUATRE as part of a Paris-Tokyo artist cultural exchange program supported by Tokyo Wonder Site Institute of Contemporary Arts and International Cultural Exchange and the City of Paris. During her residency, Sasaki will work with elderly men and women from the district and Japanese who have lived in Paris for a long time, with the objective of revisiting their memories within the installation. In order to do this, she plans to visit these people’s flats, take photographs and conduct interviews, probing their memory and their connection with private and public space.

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Tsukasa Yokozawa was born in Nagoya, Japan in 1971 and is currently based in New York City. He graduated from the Tokyo College of Photography in Yokohama in 1996, where he also taught from 2000 to 2007. His work has been exhibited in galleries and museums worldwide, including at the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo and Deichtorhallen in Hamburg. His series “Spilt Milk” features photographs of cities in Japan taken from a great distance. In 2007, he received an arts fellowship from the Japanese government to continue that series in the United States, leading to the creation of the series “Parallel Lives”, made in New York. He is now participating in a group show at Danziger Projects in New York. Yokozawa’s work is in the permanent collections of the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo and the Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation in Miami. The above work dates from 2006.

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Aya Fujioka was born in Hiroshima, and attended Nihon University’s College of Art. She has been exhibiting her work since 1996, and in 2005 she won the Visual Arts Photo Award given to promising young photographers and judged by Daido Moriyama, Yoshihiko Ueda, and Masato Seto, among others. The prize was awarded for her work entitled Comment te dire adieu, which was then published by Visual Arts.

Her work 私は眠らない (watashi wa nemuranai, or “I Don’t Sleep”), from which this photo was taken, was published as a book in late 2009 by Akaaka Art Publishing. Fujioka currently divides her time between New York City and Japan.

Please also see both our gallery and a conversation about “I Don’t Sleep” for more of Fujioka’s work.

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Ken Kitano was born in Tokyo in 1968, and graduated from Nihon University’s College of Industrial Technology in 1991. Since 1993 he has been a freelance photographer. Kitano came to prominence with the release in 2005 of his “Our Face” series of group portraits made by combining many individual portraits into a single work, and won the Newcomer’s Award from the Photographic Society of Japan in 2007. For the last three years Kitano has been one of the major hits of the prestigious Paris Photo art fair, and in both 2008 and 2009 was among the short-listed candidates for the BMW Paris Photo Prize. The critic Vince Aletti last year picked Kitano and one of five photographers “to watch”, saying “Kitano…isn’t working with ideas, he’s working with people, and his faces are mesmerizing — strong enough to draw me in from across a very crowded room.”

This coming May, Kitano will be an artist-in-residence for three months at the Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Beijing, where he will continue work on his “Our Face” project.

The above photograph comes from Kitano’s most recent series “One Day” begun in 2007, a series of landscape works which attempt to capture a given location from sunrise to sunset in one long exposure. You can see more from this series, as well as Kitano’s two other major series “Our Face” and “Flow and Fusion” in a special gallery we have prepared. Please also see our profile of Kitano.

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Nipporini is a persona created by Takahiro Wada, who was born in Tokyo in 1963, and for nearly 30 years has enjoyed a career as a professional commercial photographer. Through his commercial work he is known as something of an expert with digital cameras, publishing articles and how-tos in Japanese camera magazines. Since the early 90s, he has also been exhibiting more conceptual, personal work, including photo-sculptures and photographs made from a customized toy camera.

“Nippori Guidebook”, from which the above photo is taken, is a series of photographs made with both of digital and analog techniques, and is Nipporini’s attempt to explore the town of his birth and it undergoes many modernizing changes. Please also see our gallery of work from Wada’s Nipporini Guidebook.

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Shinji Abe is a young, 26-year old photographer who was born in Saitama Prefecture, and who graduated from Tokyo Visual Arts professional school in 2008. He has no online presence, nor a home PC for that matter, but I was fortunate to meet him at the Third District Gallery in Tokyo’s Shinjuku Ward last December on the occasion of his exhibition there entitled Tokyo. It is perhaps a cliché to say that Abe is nothing like the person we’d expect to meet based on his photography, but nevertheless that was the impression I had when I discovered that the unassuming, reserved man sitting in the gallery was Abe himself.

When I asked Abe if he was a fan of Michio Yamauchi it was no surprise to hear a resounding yes, even as he was clearly embarrassed to be mentioned in the same breath as one of the masters of the street photography genre — and another modest, humble person with a demeanor quite at odds with the photography he produces. Abe acknowledged that he has a long way to go before he can get out from under that shadow, but he remains firmly committed to continuing to ply his trade on the streets, even as he noted ruefully that it is getting harder and harder to do so in a world increasingly suspicious of strangers taking pictures of other strangers.

Please also see our special gallery of Shinji Abe’s work.

UPDATE: a slide show with more photos from the exhibition is available on the Third District Gallery web site. [Click on the top postcard image; thanks to Aya Takada]

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Tomoyuku Sakaguchi was born in Kagawa, Japan in 1969, and currently lives and works in Tokyo. In 1995 Sakaguchi received a Masters of Science from the University of Tokyo before eventually deciding to pursue photography. At the beginning of the decade Sakaguchi attended classes at the Nippon Photography Institute, as well as a workshop run by Masato Seto (Picnic, Binran). Sakaguchi has been exhibiting his work in since 2000, and in 2007 he was a runner-up for the Aperture Portfolio Award. Sakaguchi’s first book Home, from which this photo is taken, was published in 2007 by Sokyu-sha, and garnered him the annual award from the Society of Photography (Japan) in 2008.

Please also see our special gallery of Tomoyuki Sakaguchi’s work.

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Manabu Yamanaka was born in Hyogo Prefecture in 1959, and moved to Tokyo when he was 23 to pursue a career in commercial photography. Amidst the dizzying frenzy of the “bubble” years, in 1989 Yamanaka released Arakan, portraits of Tokyo homeless, which would mark the first of a career-spanning, 25-plus year body of portraits and still lives focusing on subjects outside the margins of society, including the physically deformed, street children, and the very elderly. It is from this last series of nude portraits of women in their 90s that our Cover Photo comes.

Though relatively unknown in his native Japan, Yamanaka has been exhibited widely in America and Europe, and is represented by Stefan Stux Gallery in New York.

Please also see our special gallery of Yamanaka’s work.

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Eiji Ina was born in Nagoya in 1957, and graduated from the Tokyo College of Photography in 1984. Since 1981 Ina has been exhibiting and publishing his work, starting with large format cityscapes of Tokyo (In Tokyo), but since then Ina has explored such topics as the American military in Japan (Base and Zone), the omnipresence of security cameras (Watch), and environmental issues (Waste). In 1988, he won the Higashikawa New Photographer Prize, and in 1998 he was the recipient of the Leopold Godowsky, Jr. Color Photography Award.

The above photo comes from Ina’s Emperor of Japan series, which was published in book form by Nazraeli Press in 2008. The book contains images Ina shot of the misasagi (burial mounds) of 124 of Japan’s emperors, dating back to the Kofun period some 1600 years ago. As is clear from the above photograph, Ina’s photographs of these often humble, understated tombs and mausoleums are as much about the setting as they are about the tombs themselves. The tombs provide a uniform thread, an orderly, sculpted center, while the surroundings reveal that no matter how much order and sublimity one tries to instill, chaos reigns supreme.

More examples from this series, as well as Ina’s other work, can be seen at Ina’s web site.

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