Kumi Oguro was born in Japan in 1972.
She began studying photography in London in 1996 and continued at the
Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp until 2003.
In addition to photography, she also experimented with video and installation
in a postgraduate program, Transmedia in Brussels. Her research theme in
the program was the relationship between still and moving images.
This is also the subject of her thesis for the master course in 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 dreams
after we wake up. 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, the
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 LensCulture Critics' Choice 2025 (Critics' Pick), One
Shot Award, BBA Photography Prize (winner), Gomma Photography Grant
2024 (Shortlist), Sony World Photography Awards (Shortlist) and Prix
VIRGINIA (Sélection du jury).
She created images for the production of the Flemish Opera.
Her images have been used in programmes for the Opéra national de Paris
and the Festival D'Aix-en-Provence, among others, and have become the
covers of several novels.
Her first book NOISE was published in 2008 by Le caillou bleu (Brussels).
Her second book HESTER was published by Stockmans Art Books (Duffel,
Belgium) in 2021. This book was shortlisted for the Belfast Photo Festival
2022.
She lives and works in Antwerp, Belgium since 1999.