Munemasa Takahashi

Munemasa Takahashi is a Tokyo-based photographer born in 1980 in Tokyo, Japan. He graduated from Nippon Photography Institute, Tokyo in 2001. He received the Superior prize in the 11th Canon New Cosmos of Photography in 2002. He published the first monograph "SKYFISH" (AKAAKA Art Publishing) and had a solo exhibition at AKAAKA Gallery in 2010.

After 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan, he became a member of Salvage Memory project, a volunteer effort to recover nearly 750,000 family photos that had been lost in the town of Yamamoto in Miyagi prefecture, one of the towns worst hit by tsunami.

The project returned more than 430,000 photos to their owners and it's still continuing presently.

While many of the photos were returned, there were too heavily damaged photos to be returned and thrown into a "Hopeless" box. He took these "Hopeless" photos and turned them into a traveling exhibition "Lost & Found Project" that aimed to raise funds for tsunami survivors.

The exhibition catalogue "Tsunami, Photographs, and Then - LOST&FOUND PROJECT" offers its readers a trove of information, condensing the moving exhibition into a large-format paperback publication published by AKAAKA Art Publishing in 2014.

His second monograph "Laying Stones"(VERO 2015) was listed as one of Best Photobooks Kassel 2016.