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.