Hiroshi Watanabe
				Japanese, born 1951
		Website about the artist: www.hiroshiwatanabe.com
			Artist Statement
			My photographs reflect both genuine interest in my subject as well as a respect for the element of serendipity. I strive for both calculation and discovery in my work, studying my subjects in preparation, while at the same time keeping my mind open for the surprises. The pure enjoyment of this process drives and inspires me. Mostly, I seek to capture people, traditions, and locales that first and foremost are of personal interest, while other times I seek pure beauty. I wish for my images to distill scenes ranging from the ephemeral to the eternal, from the esoteric to the symbolic. A current that underlies my work is the concept of preservation. 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, and that I constantly seek to expand Hiroshi Watanabe Portraits are always, on some level, about masks, about self-presentation and composing yourself in front of the camera. “I believe good portraits show the character and personality of the subject,” says Hiroshi Watanabi. “But this has become difficult, since most people are well-educated about photography and know how to pose.” That said, Watanabi’s portraits, taken of people from all over the world, seem to get beyond that pose, to reflect something of the essence of each person. From the beautiful young woman in a brick factory in Udaipur who gazes unflinchingly at the viewer, to the little boy, formally dressed but holding tight to his mother’s hand at a wedding in Jaipur, to the Kabuki actors in full makeup and costume. Watanabi has photographed anonymous Kabuki players from the provinces rather than famous actors in Tokyo, and he has observed that, paradoxically, they often reveal more of themselves than his other subjects, protected as they are by their costumes. Visually, Watanabi’s toned gelatin silver prints bring to mind August Sander’s People of the Twentieth Century, in which Sander set out to document categories of people in Germany’s Weimar Republic. But Watanabi’s nuanced portraits are less about types and more about what is singular and unique in each of his subjects.