KWAIDAN

Hiroshi Watanabe was born in Japan. He graduated from Department of Photography at Nihon University in 1975. He moved to Los Angeles after graduation and became involved in the production of TV commercials for Japan. He later established his own production company and produced numerous commercials. He received an MBA degree from UCLA Business School in 1993. In 1995 his passion for photography rekindled, and since then he has traveled worldwide extensively photographing what he finds intriguing at that moment and place. In 2000 he closed the production company in order to devote himself entirely to the art. Since then, his work has been published and exhibited around the world, and he received numerous awards. His work is in the permanent collections of many art museums such as Philadelphia Museum of Art, Houston Museum of Fine Arts, George Eastman House, Santa Barbara Museum of Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, San Jose Museum of Art, New Mexico Museum of Art, North Carolina Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art. In 2016, He received the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant.

‘Out of this year’s vast ocean of photography books, Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things, stands out for me.’ Elizabeth Avedon, PhotoEye