A Canvas To Our Imagination

Koichiro Kurita’s work has been widely exhibited and is represented in numerous collections, including the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Harvard Art Museums, the Maison Europeenne de la Photographie, and many more. 

As a student of Perceptual Psychology at Kwansei Gakuin University, Kurita made extensive use of his camera in order to research the human perception of moving objects under changing circumstances. In the mid-1980s, he quit a successful career in commercial photography, and embarked on a new path as a landscape and nature photographer – inspired, in particular, by the nature-focused writings of American author and philosopher Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862).

The current exhibition at Berlin’s Photokunst Breede Gallery presents the photographer’s visual meditations on the timeless relationship between man and nature – guided by the question: ‘What if Thoreau had been a photographer?’ 

In terms of technique, Kurita opted for the calotype for this project, an early photographic process invented by William Henry Fox Talbot in 1841. It involves creating a paper negative, from which a positive contact print is then produced through exposure to sunlight.