Reiko Imoto

Reiko Imoto was born and grew up in Kobe, Japan, where she found her love of art during early childhood. After she was given her father's old 35mm SLR camera, she started photography in 1993. Reiko left Japan in 1994, and lived in Ireland, England, and the United States. In 2002 she earned a Master's degree of Fine Arts in photography from Savannah College of Art and Design in Georgia. Since 2004, she has lived and worked as a fine art photographer in Brussels, Belgium, having solo as well as group exhibitions, publishing books, and giving lectures and slideshows in Europe, the United States, Japan and Cuba. In 2016 she has moved back to her home country, Japan.

Since 1993, Reiko has had 32 solo exhibitions and 37 group exhibitions in the galleries, art centers, museums, universities, embassies, international photo festivals and art fairs in 16 countries: Japan, England, the United States, Poland, Slovakia, Russia, China, Belgium, France, Switzerland, Spain, Sweden, the Czech Republic, Germany, Cuba and Greece. Some of her solo exhibitions were invitational exhibitions in several international festivals of photography such as "Fotofestiwal" (Lodz, Poland, 2004), "Month of Photography" (Bratislava, Slovakia, 2005), "Diaporama, festival de photographie" (Nantes, France, 2006), and "Fotoseptiembre USA" (San Antonio, Texas, USA, 2006 and 2008). 

Many of Reiko's works have become part of private and public collections in Asia, Europe, and the United States. Some of her prints were selected for the "Art Collection of F. Hoffmann - La Roche AG," Basel, Switzerland in 2010. She has won several grants and awards including the Best Portfolio Award at the "International Portfolio Review" in Bratislava, Slovakia in 2004. 

The consistent themes in Reiko's series of works are dreams, memories, imagination, wishes, and so on: the things we can see only when our eyes are closed. Being an ardent admirer of psychology of dreams and subconsciousness, the world of fairy tales, and surrealism art, she thinks of what is seen only within one's own inner world (personal vision) as "another reality," and has been working on capturing such internal reality on her photographs. Instead of giving the "answers," her work confronts the viewers with "questions" of what reality is.