Documenting his own family since 1999, Takahiro Kaneyama’s unpretentious photographs quietly reveal his complex relationship with home and family. His mother, who suffers from schizophrenia, raised him with the aids of his grandmother and his two unmarried aunts. The story he tells with these bravely honest portraits and landscapes resonates both as a personal confession and a meditation on universal aspects of love, depression, and the passage of time.
Born in Tokyo in 1971, Takahiro Kaneyama studied film and photography at the City College of New York, earned an MFA in Photography and Related Media at the School of Visual Arts, and then studied documentary photography at the International Center of Photography. The recipient of several photo awards, Kaneyama has exhibited in Tokyo, Osaka, New York, Milwaukee, and Zurich.
In 2016, he was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and also completed an artist-in-residence at Light Work, Syracuse, New York. His book “While Leaves Are Falling…” (AKAAKA Publishing, Inc.) —accompanied by an essay by Eric Shiner — is “as beautiful, complex and heartfelt as its subject” according to Charlotte Cotton, a renowned photo curator/writer. It has been nominated for two of the most prestigious Japanese photography awards. In 2017, along with his solo exhibition at MIYAKO YOSHINAGA, he participated in a group exhibition at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan with his “While Leaves Are Falling” series.