Atsushi Fujiwara

Semimaru (2017) is named after a noh play [Wikidata ] that in turn is named after its main character. The book looks for traces of Semimaru on Mt Ōsaka [Wikidata ] and elsewhere in what is now Shiga prefecture.

As a child, Fujiwara had visited Nagashima Aiseien, a leper sanatorium, whose general manager was an uncle of his. He returned there 35 years later, influenced by Kaijin Akashi, who had been incarcerated there and had died there, but whose poems continued to express joy despite his loss of sight and other physical decay. For his book Poet Island (2015), Fujiwara photographed the sanatorium and depicted mementoes of Akashi's. Recommending an exhibition of these photographs at Zen Foto Gallery (Roppongi), Kōtarō Iizawa praised this and Fujiwara's two previous photobooks as of high quality.

Nangokusho: Ode to the Southern Lands of Japan (2013) was the first of four photobooks by Fujiwara to be published by Sokyu-sha [Wikidata ] , each of these containing work in black and white. It borrows the title Nangokushō (南国頌 ) from a collection of tanka by Fujiwara's grandfather, Tōmon Fujiwara (the pseudonym of Hiroji Fujiwara), who, after workplace conflicts elsewhere, had eventually settled down to a satisfying post as teacher in Kagoshima. The book presents photographs of Kagoshima from 2009 and 2010.

After working as an interior designer, Fujiwara went to Britain in 1989, working as an architectural designer and in the restaurant business. Back in Japan, in 2005 he set up a photographic studio. A year later, he started out as a photographer, this unusually late start being helped by the photographers Kiyoshi Tanno [Wikidata ] and Daidō Moriyama.

Fujiwara was born in Okayama City in 1963. His family soon moved to Ōyamazaki (Kyoto), and moved again to Shiga when he was at primary school. He lived in Yasu (Shiga) until he was 26, and considers himself a native of Shiga.