Masakichi
Masakichi lives in Saitama, an ordinary Japanese city that isn’t a major tourist destination. He began taking photographs in 2024, teaching himself the craft. Even as a child, he loved creating things with his hands—drawing and building models. Alongside his budding passion for photography, he began visiting museums and developed a deep interest in architectural and contemporary art.
As the father of a young son, Masakichi found his freedom to travel becoming more limited—a constraint that became the starting point for his work. Upon discovering abstract architectural photography on Instagram, he realized he didn’t need to travel far to find a subject: the everyday environment surrounding his family was enough. “True artistic freedom doesn’t lie in traveling far, but in looking at our everyday surroundings with fresh eyes—proof that creativity often arises from limitations,” he says. He then began isolating minimalist geometric shapes within the urban landscape around him, using tight framing under intense light and manipulating color in post-production to flatten the volume of architectural forms into graphic compositions. His work draws inspiration from the philosophy of Saul Leiter, a pioneering American color photographer for whom “everything is photography”; from the geometric flattening of Franco Fontana, an Italian photographer known for transforming urban architecture into geometric fields of color; and from the pop sensibility of Andy Warhol.
Masakichi's work has won numerous international awards, including a silver medal at the Prix de la Photographie Paris and three gold medals at the Budapest International Foto Awards. What drives the artist? “To transform everyday architecture into abstract art.”
