Name Kei Orihara | Role Photographer | |
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Kei Orihara (折原 恵, Orihara Kei, born 1948) is a Japanese photographer whose work has portrayed the United States and who has created photobooks for children.
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Life and career
Orihara was born in 1948 in Shimonoseki, Yamaguchi Prefecture, Japan. She studied at the Faculty of Letters of Chuo University (Tokyo), and became keen on photography via a photography club there. After graduation, she worked for some time in publishing before setting out in 1977 as a freelance photographer, concentrating on magazine work, for which routine assignments included photographs of people being interviewed for magazines, and portraits of poets for the magazine Gendai-shi techō (現代詩手帖).
Orihara held her first solo exhibition, Soul South, in 1977. An early project was of people sitting in Tokyo trains. From 1979 to 1981 she lived in New York City, where she became close friends with a model named Jana; photographs of Jana's everyday life were exhibited in Japan in 1982, turned into a feature within the Japanese edition of Playboy, and into a book (Jana: The New York Girl) published in 1984. This was notable both for being a woman's portrait of a woman and for Orihara's free discussion in the texts of her perceptions of the differences and similarities between her model and herself.
In 1984 Orihara was noted for her success in interior portraits with natural and ambient light; she avoided flash.
Various photography exhibitions followed, while Orihara's major work was portrait photography for magazines, for example accompanying a series written by Amy Yamada in Men's Non-no. In 2000 she was living in Tokyo.
In 1999 Orihara published Photo Love, a book of her writing about life as a photographer, illustrated with photographs. It appeared during something of a boom in photography among young people; but Orihara had noted that the concerns of many of the young photographers were private, and she hoped to encourage people to see photography as a tool with which they could relate to other people and to society.
In keeping with Orihara's interest in people who at first seemed different from herself, she took on projects on young, third-generation Koreans in Japan, and people at a Roman Catholic church in Sotome, Nagasaki Prefecture.
Orihara turned to townscapes, photographing the port cities of Kobe, Kita-Kyūshū and Hakodate, and the rooftop water towers of New York City (especially those of the traditional, barrel-like construction); the latter appeared both for adults interested in photography and as a photobook for children.
From 2004 until 2010, Orihara lived in Athens, Georgia; she then moved to New York. From July 2011 until March 2016 she ran a photoblog of scenes in and near Sunnyside, Queens.
Exhibitions
Collections
Eleven photographs by Orihara of the Jana series and seven of the Gogo no jōkyaku (午後の乗客, afternoon passengers) series are in the collection of the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.