Kumi Oguro

Kumi Oguro is born in Japan in 1972.

Her study of photography started in London in 1996, followed by further development at Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp until 2003. 

Next to photography, she also experimented with video and installation in the postgraduate program, Transmedia in Brussels. Her research theme in the program was the relation between still and moving image. 

This subject is also treated later on in her thesis for the master course, Film studies and Image Culture at the University of Antwerp in 2006. 

In her photographic work, Oguro creates a world just next to our daily reality. Although she would not call her images ‘dream-like’, there is an intangible quality about them, which is similar to the difficulty of describing our waking dreams. There is no story contained within her photographs that has any kind of logical flow. 

Throughout her career to date, she has consistently photographed female models in staged settings.

For Oguro, it is only women who have this extreme duality: they are balancing on a thin line between the alluring and the eerie, the fragile and the destructive, the playful and the tragic.

Oguro has participated in exhibitions and art/photography fairs in Europe, USA, Canada and Japan.

In 2016 and 2017, she took part in the travelling exhibition FotoFilmic '16 – 

Los Angeles / Vancouver / Melbourne.

She won the 4^th place in this juried exhibition.

Other awards include The Aesthetica Art Prize (Longlist), The Royal Photographic Society’s International Photography Exhibition (Finalist), Sony World Photography Awards (Shortlist), Photobook Melbourne Photo Award (Finalist) and Prix VIRGINIA (Sélection du jury).

She created images for the productions of the Flemish Opera.

Her images have been used for program books including Opéra national de Paris and Festival D'Aix-en-Provence and became a cover of a couple of novels.

Her first book NOISE was published by Le caillou bleu (Brussels) in 2008.

A selection of her work is included in the publication PORTRAITS DE JAMBES DANS LA PHOTOGRAPHIE CONTEMPORAINE (2010, Editions Eyrolles, Paris) together with Erwin Blumenfeld, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Martine Fougeron among others.

Her second book HESTER was published by Stockmans Art Books (Duffel, Belgium) in September 2021. 

This book was shortlisted for Belfast Photo Festival 2022.