Ichigo Sugawara was born in Kanagawa, Japan in 1960. At the Osaka University of Art he studied under Kazuo Miyagawa, the director of photography for the filmmaker Akira Kurosawa. During this time he became enamored by the expression of dazzling light in Kurosawa’s film Rashomon, and began seeking his own ways of expressing light and warmth through photography.
Sugarwara created a unique process combining the wet plate with digital techniques adapted for this contemporary era. He built the unit with Motoyuki Kubo, one of the best printers in Japan, to create his own formula of compounded emulsion for glass print. Sugawara’s wet collodion process is completely new and yet orthodox at the same time.
SELECT COLLECTIONS
Museum of Photographic Arts, San Diego, CA
Bibliothèque nationale de France, Paris
Hanmi Photograph Museum, Seoul, South Korea
Kobe Fashion Museum, Japan
Gunma Prefectural Museum of History, Japan