All images by Hiroki Fujitani. Used with permission.
“I had been painting since I was a child,” says photographer Hiroki Fujitani. In 2000, he took up photography at the birth of his child. Hiroki was the winner of this year’s EyeEm Photo Awards for the Portraitist category, but here’s the thing, he isn’t really a portrait photographer. Instead, Fujitani is a street photographer who hails from Japan who has won the Photokina World of Imaging Award in 2014 and has been featured in Vogue Italia.
When Hiroki photographs a person, he is genuinely interested in them. “What kind of past does the person have, and what kind of future is there? What kind of living is done, and where do you live?” are some of the questions Hiroki thinks about the people he photographs. “I’m interested in the person who walks a life different from [everyone else].” When he intentionally takes a portrait he finds that certain people have a mysterious appearance.
Many of Hiroki’s images are in black and white. “I believe that it’s a monochrome picture that you can’t be cheated by the color and can sharpen a theme.”