Born in Tokyo in 1963, Emi Anrakuji represents herself as an alchemist of images and a catalyst for daydreams and desires. Her deeply personal work blurs the boundaries between documentary and staged photography. Posing naked, clothed, or partially dressed, Anrakuji takes a uniquely obsessive interest in her own body.
Emi Anrakuji (b. 1963) is a Tokyo-based female photographer working primarily in black and white since the 1990s. She studied oil painting at Musashino University of Art and Music, but cerebral cancer which caused a severe degradation of her eyesight forced her to quit painting. Instead, she taught herself photography using the camera lens as a replacement for her eyes. Since 2001 her work has been exhibited extensively across the United States, Japan, Korea, the United Kingdom, Spain, and France. A Higashikawa New Photograph Prize winner in 2006, Anrakuji participated in the Daegu Photo Biennale in South Korea in 2008 and PhotoEspaña in 2017. Her work has been featured in several notable publications including FOAM, The New Yorker, and IMA. She has also published five monographs—HMMT? (2005) from Yu-Time Shuppan, Anrakuji (2006), e-hagaki (2006), and IPY (2008) from Nazraeli Press, and MISHO (2017) from SHINTO editions.