Sohei Nishino

Sohei Nishino produces works based on his personal experiences obtained through walking and travelling. In making his “diorama maps,” he combines photography, collage, cartography and psycho-geography to create large prints of urban landscapes. He walks alone a city’s streets for an average of three months, exploring many vantage points and gathering hundreds of rolls of exposed film.

He then patiently prints the photographs by hand and compiles them to form a tableau. He will use it as the basis for his limited edition photographs From a distance the maps are almost abstract, it is not until we examine them in detail that the full diorama unfolds—the theatre of one man’s city played out in miniature. Nishino graduated from Osaka University of the Arts in 2004. He has exhibited his work internationally and obtained numerous awards including “President Award,” Osaka University of Arts (2004), “Young Eye Japanese Photographer Association Award” (2005), “Canon New Cosmos Photography Award” (2005) and the “Canon Excellence Award” (2005). He has also participated in several group shows, festivals and solo exhibitions: Daegu Photo Biennale, Korea (2010); “Out of Focus,” Saatchi Gallery, London (2012); “Contemporary Japanese Photography vol.10,” Tokyo, Metropolitan Museum of Photography (2012); “A Different Kind of Order: ICP Triennial,” New York (2013); KYOTOGRAPHY festival, Kyoto (2014); Tokyo International Photography Festival, Tokyo (2015); “Sohei Nishino CITIES,” Polka Gallery, Paris (2015). In 2016 the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) dedicated him a solo exhibition. In 2017 he was shortlisted for the theme Space of Prix Pictet.