May 1 – 31, 2003
I go to places that captivate and intrigue me. I am interested in what humans do. I seek to capture people, traditions, and locales that first and foremost are of personal interest. I immerse myself with information on the places prior to leaving, but I try to avoid firm, preconceived ideas. I strive for both calculation and discovery in my work, keeping my mind open for surprises. At times, I envision images I’d like to capture, but when I actually look through the viewfinder, my mind goes blank and I photograph whatever catches my eye. Photographs I return with are usually different from my original concepts. My photographs reflect both genuine interest in my subject as well as a respect for the element of serendipity, while other times I seek pure beauty. The pure enjoyment of this process drives and inspires me. I also believe there’s a thread that connects all of my work — my personal vision of the world as a whole. I make every effort to be a faithful visual recorder of the world around me, a world in flux that, at very least in my mind, deserves preservation.
Hiroshi Watanabe was born in Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan. He graduated from the Department of Photography of Nihon University, and moved to Los Angeles, where he worked as a production coordinator for Japanese television commercials and later co-founded a Japanese coordination services company. Hiroshi Watanabe obtained an MBA from the UCLA Anderson Business School in 1993. Two years later, however, his earlier interest in photography revived, and he started to travel worldwide, extensively photographing what he found intriguing at each moment and place. Since 2000, Hiroshi Watanabe have worked full-time at photography.
After Hiroshi Watanabe produced five self-published books, his first collection to be published conventionally was I See Angels Every Day, monochrome portraits of patients and scenes from San Lázaro psychiatric hospital in Quito, Ecuador. This work won Japan’s 2007 Photo City Sagamihara Award for professional photographers.
In 2006, Hiroshi Watanabe won a Critical Mass Award from Photolucida, Portland, OR, resulting in publication of his monograph Findings in 2007.
In 2006 and 2007, Hiroshi Watanabe traveled to North Korea, and his book documenting the experience, titled Ideology of Paradise, was published in Japan. With that work Hiroshi Watanabe won First Prize in the Santa Fe Center Project Competition in 2008.
In 2009 Hiroshi Watanabe received a commission from the San Jose (California) Museum of Art to document from an artist’s perspective subjects of his choice relating to the city’s Japantown. He decided to photograph artifacts from the Japanese internment camps established during the Second World War. All images from this project were purchased by the museum and exhibited in 2011.
In 2010 Hiroshi Watanabe was chosen as one of fourteen artists invited to photograph Venice, Italy, for a project called Real Venice, a major art initiative to raise funds for Venice. The artists were commissioned to visit the city and create a portfolio of images with total artistic freedom. The result, the Real Venice exhibition, was shown during the 54th Venice Biennale at San Giorgio Maggiore Abbey and later at the Somerset House in London (May 31 to September 30 and October 10 to December 11, 2011, respectively).
In 2013 Hiroshi Watanabe was invited to participate in Bull City Summer in Durham, North Carolina, a project inspired by the 25th anniversary of the movie Bull Durham. Ten nationally and internationally acclaimed photographers documented the 2013 season at the Durham Bulls Athletic Park, home of the legendary minor league baseball team. The exhibit was shown at the North Carolina Museum of Art (February 23 to August 31, 2014).
From April 4 to July 21, 2014, his photographs of artifacts from the Tule Lake Japanese internment camps were the centerpiece exhibit in The Art of Survival: Enduring the Turmoil of Tule Lake, at the Favell Museum in Klamath Falls, Oregon. The exhibition is currently on tour in the US.
In 2016 Hiroshi Watanabe received a grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation.
www.hiroshiwatanabe.com