We are absolutely delighted to have MAKIKO participating in our Photography on a Postcard Exhibition at Photo London which opens to public tomorrow! MAKIKO is an award-winning photographer who has featured in exhibitions in North America, Japan and Europe through competitions. She learned photography in International Centre of Photography in New York and has worked professionally since 2006. Her work has a wonderful explorative quality that informs and inspires whilst captivating us with it's beauty. There is an introspective documentation of the artist and the world around her present in her photographs.
In August 2014, after working on the project for over six years, she launched her first documentary/photography book titled 'Beautifully Different'. The book is a brilliantly rounded study of Autism Spectrum Disorders, a much needed insight into the lives of children who live with this difference. In many ways it is a celebration of the uniqueness and inquisitive nature of the children. The book does not tell the usual story of hardship and overwhelming difficulty, in fact it raises our awareness that ASD is also part of the lives of children with tremendous intellectual and emotional capacity. Benjamin, a young boy looks over the bridge onto the train platform checking for the times he had saved in his memory. This young boys fascination with order, transportation, timing, reminds us that there is beauty and magic in the quotidian. We too often overlook things that function as part of our everyday and forget to find joy and life in them, perhaps that is our disorder.
Metroliner - Benjamin. I met Benjamin at Union Station in D.C. As it is common among a child with high-functioning autism, he had photographic memory and the train timetables were “saved” in his mind. He checked a time and started running from a platform to the top of the multi-storied car park then suddenly stopped at the end. He seemed to belong to the entire scene of the Metroliner approaching - it was magical. © MAKIKO/West Village Imagery, Ltd. 2018
The book was released in collaboration with Dr. Landa, Professor in Psychiatry, Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, U.S. In March 2016, it was re-published by Nihon Bungeisha, a Tokyo publisher for the Japanese market.
In January 2018, her photography book entitled "BATTLESHIP ISLAND" was published by Dewi Lewis Publishing, a leading photographer publisher in the world. The book was presented at PARIS PHOTO in November 2017.
MAKIKO was granted rare permission to photograph the restricted zone of Battleship Island, shortly after it was recognised as a UNESCO World Heritage site. The tiny, fortress-like island (also known as ’Hashima’ or ‘Gunkanjima’) lies just off the coast of Nagasaki. Ringed by a seawall, and covered in tightly packed buildings, it was once the most densely populated place on Earth. Now it is a ghost town – completely uninhabited for more than forty years.
Abandoned in 1974, all that now remains is the dramatic sea wall that surrounds it, and its tightly packed, concrete buildings, undisturbed except by nature. In the book, archive photographs break the eerie silence of the island’s contemporary landscape and through the memories of a former resident of the island, MAKIKO brings her imagination to bear on what life was like there as a child – a place described to her as a childhood paradise.