How Rising Up in a Haunted Home Kickstarted This Award-Successful Photographer’s Profession

When Akari Takenobu was alone at dwelling as a baby, she heard unusual sounds all through her home. These recollections hang-out her artwork, together with “Threshold,” the sequence that earned Takenobu, a grasp’s pupil at Tokyo University of the Arts, the 2026 Dior Beauty Photography and Visual Arts Award for Young Talents, introduced annually throughout Les Rencontres d’Arles, the French metropolis’s half-century-old images competition.

“Threshold” includes a sequence of black-and-white self-portraits wherein Takenobu by no means reveals her face. She images her physique, cuts the pictures aside, and reassembles them into biomorphic shapes that hover within the uncanny house between the pure and the supernatural. “Akari’s work immediately captivated me with its unique aesthetic power, blending an almost vintage, Man Ray–esque quality with a distinctly contemporary sensibility,” says Peter Philips, Creative and Image Director for Dior Makeup.

Takenobu was chosen by a jury led by British photographer David Sims and together with photographer Vasantha Yogananthan, Maison Européenne de la Photographie director Julie Jones, LUMA Arles founder Maja Hoffmann, and Philips. In Arles in July, Takenobu spoke with CULTURED about haunted homes, infrared images, and the bounds of the human senses.

Describe your work in just a few phrases.

Simulated. Staged. In pursuit of the invisible.

How did concepts of uncanny areas and haunting enter your life?

When I used to be a baby, I lived in a home that some would possibly describe as haunted. I’d hear sounds when nobody else was there, and though these moments frightened me, in addition they stayed with me very deeply. As an solely baby, I usually felt alone, but on the similar time I had the distinct sensation of sharing that house with an unseen presence. I wish to create an area wherein the unknown can stay unresolved but felt.

Why do you employ your individual physique in your work?

I start with my very own physique as a logo of physicality, materiality, and human presence. Once photographed, the physique turns into a picture and loses a few of its bodily actuality. I then fragment and reconstruct that picture, making a determine that is still seen however is now not totally embodied. Through this course of, I attempt to transfer nearer to one thing ghostlike and provides type to its ambiguity.

You have additionally labored with infrared gentle. What does it mean you can see?

I’m drawn to frequencies and phenomena that exist past the bounds of human notion as a result of they counsel that actuality extends far past what we will instantly confirm. Infrared makes seen a spectrum that’s current however inaccessible to the bare eye. It presents a mind-set about visibility not as one thing mounted, however as one thing contingent and incomplete. 

Through your work, what’s the invisible?

I don’t know but, and accepting that uncertainty is important to my follow.

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