Katsu Naito

Japanese photographer Katsu Naito began taking photos in his early 20s, after moving to New York. Motivated by the question of how he could capture emotional qualities on film and paper, Naito started his career by shooting his fellow New Yorkers on the street during the 1980s. Throughout his career he has tried to find or create a moment of emotional connection in his work, representing the surrounding environment in an organic and simple manner. Naito believes photography is an amazing medium to capture and seal emotions and feelings of a particular moment for posterity, and his work has a timelessness to it as a result of this approach.

Naito’s photographs of Harlem were collected in a book titled Once in Harlem, published in 2017. His portraits of Japanese-American female survivors of internment and their descendants were commissioned and published by Vogue US in 2019. In 2010 Naito presented his first international exhibition, West Side Rendezvous, at Nepenthes in New York City.