Takehiko Nakafuji was born in 1970 in Tokyo, and after attending Waseda University he transferred to the Tokyo Visual Arts College where he graduated from the photography department. In 2013 he won the Special Price at the 29th annual Higashikawa International Photo Festival, and to date has published several photography books including Winterlicht (2001), Night Crawler 1995 & 2010 (2011), Sakuan, Matapaan – Hokkaido (2013), and his latest, STREET RAMBLER (2014), from which the above photo comes from.
Please also see this gallery with more images from Nakafuji’s STREET RAMBLER.
Shinya Arimoto was born in 1971 in Osaka. He won the No.35 Taiyo award in 1997 and set up TOTEM POLE PHOTO GALLERY in 2008. Arimoto has been photographing and exhibiting work since 1994. Currently teaching photography at the Tokyo School of Visual Arts, he has supervised and lead the artist-run Totem Pole Photo Gallery since founding it in 2008.
Hidekazu Maiyama is a Tokyo-based photographer who was born in 1962. Maiyama graduated from Kyushu Sangyo University in 1980. He makes his living as a commercial photographer photographing for mainstream magazines. The personal work series that this image is taken from was photographed in Berlin, Germany in winter 2011/12. It was inspired by the now classic film Wings of Desire by Wim Wenders. The film is about invisible, immortal angels who populate Berlin and listen to the thoughts of the human inhabitants and comfort those who are in distress. Even though the city is densely populated, many of the people are isolated and estranged from their loved ones. (Wikipedia). The photos aim to take the viewpoint of angels and bring the idea of the film into the contemporary.
Masako Miyazaki was born in Tokyo, Japan. She was interested in different cultures since junior high school and became interested in photography as the way of expression while visiting various countries. She studied photography in the US, Canada and Japan since 2001 and has exhibited works in solo and group exhibitions in Canada and Japan. She is currently living and working as an artist in Tokyo.
Miyazaki’s work from the series The Other Side was published in a book from Tosei-sha in late 2011, available as signed copies in the Japan Exposures bookstore.
Yoshihiro Hagiwara was born in Gunma Prefecture in 1961, and since graduating from the Department of Fine Arts at Nihon University in 1985 has been a professional photographer, spending over 20 years at Mainichi Shimbun, one of Japan’s major newspapers. Pursuing his own personal photography, he won a newcomer’s prize at Photo City Sagamihara in 2001, and in 2010 won a special prize at the Higashikawa International Photo Festival. Two books of his photography have been published — the 2004 Kyokan Zanei, and Snowy in 2008. (Both books are available in the Japan Exposures bookstore.)
The photo above comes from his “Kyokan Zanei” series, which explores the various shut down and abandoned coal (and other) mines throughout Japan, which Hagiwara has been visiting and photographing for 30 years.
Harumichi Saito was born in Tokyo in 1983, and graduated from the Shakujii School for the Deaf in Tokyo in 2004. After being an Honorable Selection by photography critic Kotaro Iizawa in the Canon New Cosmos Photography competition of 2009, he returned to the competition in 2010 and was photographer Masafumi Sanai’s selection for one of four Excellence Awards handed out, for the work from which the above photo is taken.
Saito’s work focuses on people living with disabilities, but his work is not in itself a portrait of disability. As Saito himself commented at the time of his 2010 New Cosmos award, “I was never satisfied with photography that concerns disabilities. They are usually either monochrome photographs that are too austere, or the exact opposite: unnaturally cheerful and full of smiles. I never felt comfortable with this.”
Shintaro Sato was born in 1969 in Tokyo, and graduated from Tokyo College of Photography in 1992 and Waseda University School of Letters Arts and Sciences in 1995. After working as a staff cameraman for Kyodo News for 7 years, he left there in 2001 and has been a freelance photographer since. In 2008, Sato’s Tokyo Twilight Zone was published by Seigensha to great acclaim, and the next year Sato received the 2009 Newcomer’s Award from the Photographic Society of Japan. The above photo comes from Sato’s most recent work, centering on the Tokyo Sky Tree broadcasting tower soon to be opened in Tokyo’s Sumida Ward. This work has been collected into the book Risen in the East, published this month, also by Seigensha. If you’re in the Tokyo area, Photo Gallery International will be exhibiting Sato’s new work from January 13 – February 25.
