Born 1938 in Ikeda, Osaka. A designer turned photographer, he worked as an assistant to Takeji Iwamiya and Eikoh Hosoe before becoming a freelance photographer in 1964, winning the New Artist Award of the Japan Photo Critics Society in 1967 for his series such as 'Japan Photo Theater' published in Camera Mainichi magazine.
He has had major exhibitions worldwide, including SFMoMA (1999), the National Museum of Art, Osaka (2011), Tate Modern (2012) and IMS (2022), and was awarded the ICP Infinity Award (2012) and the Order of Arts and Culture from the French Government (2018), Hasselblad International Photography Award (2019), and has received international acclaim.