Kosuke Okahara (born 1980) is a Japanese photographer who covers social issues in the tradition of humanistic documentary photography.
Kosuke Okahara (born 1980) is a Japanese photographer who covers social issues in the tradition of humanistic documentary photography.
Okahara was born in Tokyo and studied education at Waseda University before starting his career as a photographer.
In 2004, he began "Ibasyo" a long-term photographic essay [1] on adolescent self-harm in Japan. The project received the W. Eugene Smith Fellowship in Humanistic Photography in 2010. [2] He subsequently worked on stories in Japan and elsewhere and published the book Fukushima Fragments (2015) on the aftermath of the 2011 disaster. [2]
Since the late 2010s, Okahara’s practice has included hand-made photobooks and materially oriented presentations. Works from his series Vanishing Existence were presented at the Musée Cernuschi, Paris (17 September – 8 December 2024). [3] [4]
Other topics he has photographed are the Arab Spring, the chaos on the Russian periphery, [5] [6] and migrants around Calais in 2008. Since the Fukushima nuclear accident in 2011, he documents the region devastated by the disaster with a particular attention given to the signs of time. [7] This latter work is the subject of a book, Fukushima Fragments (2015). [8]
In 2017–2018, the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (BSB) in Munich staged the exhibition SHOWCASE – Artists’ books from the collection of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek; [9] BSB’s magazine report on the opening explicitly mentions Okahara by name in connection with the presentation. [10]
Auch der japanische Künstler und Fotograf Kosuke Okahara konnte persönlich begrüßt werden.
