Born in 1947, Hitoshi Fugo studied photography at Nihon University in Tokyo. After graduation he worked for Eikoh Hosoe, a leading postwar photographer in Japan. In 1973 he became a freelance photographer and lived in New York and Paris for the next several years. During the 1970s and 1980s, he traveled extensively and created many series including BLACKOUT, which he first exhibited in Tokyo in 1982 under the title Dark Changes. Fugo's work has had international exposure in exhibitions such as Japanese Photography Today (Spain, 1986), Japanese Contemporary Photography (Germany, 2000) and BLACKOUT (U.S., 2018 and Belgium, 2019). He is a winner of Ina Nobuo Photography Award in 2010.
His works can be found in the collections of the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, the Kushiro Art Museum in Hokkaido, the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto and the Bibliothèque nationale de France.