Seiji Kurata (倉田精二, Kurata Seiji, 1945 - 27 February 2020) was a Japanese photographer.
Kurata was born in Chūō-ku, Tokyo, 1945. He graduated from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in 1968. [1] He taught in secondary school and worked in oils, printmaking, and experimental movies. [2] He practised under Daidō Moriyama in an independent photography workshop in 1976. [3]
Kurata won the fifth Kimura Ihei Award in 1980 for his first book, Flash Up. For the black-and-white photographs here, Kurata used flash and a medium format camera, [4] resulting in a detailed portrait of a world of bōsōzoku, gangsters, rightists, strippers, transvestites, and so on: as Parr and Badger point out, these are old subjects; but in his "highly polished, detailed" work, Kurata "has an unerring instinct for pictures that suggest stories". [5] Photo Cabaret and 80's Family continued in this direction. This Japanese work of Kurata's is anthologized in his later volume Japan. Kurata won the PSJ award in 1992. A long stay in Mongolia in 1994 led to the book Toransu Ajia, which continued color work of the Asian mainland started with Dai-Ajia. In 1999 Kurata's book Japan won the Kodansha Publishing Culture Award (講談社出版文化賞) for a work of photography. [6] Prints of Kurata's photographs are in the permanent collections of ICP (New York), the Brooklyn Museum, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. [7]
He died on 27 February 2020. [8]
Following a title in Japanese script, an italicized roman-letter title is one provided on or in the book itself; a non-italicized roman-letter title is a mere gloss of the original title.
Seiji Kurata (倉田精二, Kurata Seiji, 1945 - 27 February 2020) was a Japanese photographer.
Kurata was born in Chūō-ku, Tokyo, 1945. He graduated from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music in 1968. [1] He taught in secondary school and worked in oils, printmaking, and experimental movies. [2] He practised under Daidō Moriyama in an independent photography workshop in 1976. [3]
Kurata won the fifth Kimura Ihei Award in 1980 for his first book, Flash Up. For the black-and-white photographs here, Kurata used flash and a medium format camera, [4] resulting in a detailed portrait of a world of bōsōzoku, gangsters, rightists, strippers, transvestites, and so on: as Parr and Badger point out, these are old subjects; but in his "highly polished, detailed" work, Kurata "has an unerring instinct for pictures that suggest stories". [5] Photo Cabaret and 80's Family continued in this direction. This Japanese work of Kurata's is anthologized in his later volume Japan. Kurata won the PSJ award in 1992. A long stay in Mongolia in 1994 led to the book Toransu Ajia, which continued color work of the Asian mainland started with Dai-Ajia. In 1999 Kurata's book Japan won the Kodansha Publishing Culture Award (講談社出版文化賞) for a work of photography. [6] Prints of Kurata's photographs are in the permanent collections of ICP (New York), the Brooklyn Museum, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. [7]
He died on 27 February 2020. [8]
Following a title in Japanese script, an italicized roman-letter title is one provided on or in the book itself; a non-italicized roman-letter title is a mere gloss of the original title.