PHOTOGRAPHING WITH A BLIND MIND

Read through the names Southern California-based photographer Hiroshi Watanabe gives his photographic series—Lotus Dreams, Dunes, Bull City Summer, Ideology in Paradise, I See Angels Every Day—and you’ll find that each one has an almost haiku-like, understated quality. Yet, none of them seem related to each other, as if each series is a one-off.

Upon closer inspection, Watanabe’s extensive body of work, though, reveals a classic Japanese aesthetic and attention to detail as he attempts, he says, “to be a faithful visual recorder of the world around me.” And while this is, he says, “a world in flux,” he believes that “at the very least, in my mind, [it] deserves preservation."

Born in Sapporo, Japan, on the northern island of Hokkaido, Watanabe graduated from the Department of Photography of Nihon University in 1975 and moved to Los Angeles to work as a production coordinator for Japanese television commercials and later co-founded his own coordination services company. In 1993, he earned an MBA from UCLA, but two years later revived his earlier interest