Coho Come Home

From Tokyo, Japan, Ai Iwane is a photographer who studied in the United States at Petrolia High School (1991), an alternative school located in Northern California, where she led an off-grid and self-sufficient life while studying. She began her career as a photographer in 1996. While focusing on assignments for magazines and various music-related work, her focus has been in observing and documenting niche communities around the world. In 2006 she shifted the focus of her attention to the culture of Japanese people in Hawaii. Since 2013, she has been partly based in Miharu, Fukushima, her work in recent years is mainly themed on the connection between Hawaii and Fukushima as embodied by immigrants. Her first monograph “KIPUKA” was published by Seigensha Art Publishing in 2018. The book and the exhibitions were awarded the 44th Kimura Ihei Photography Award (2019) and the 44th Ina Nobuo Award (2019). Her work has been shown at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Tokyo; Fukushima Museum, Fukushima; Dali International Photography Exhibition, China; Maui Arts & Cultural Center, Hawaii; Setouchi International Photo Festival. The latest work “A NEW RIVER”, a narrative based around her travel to North Japan, in search of cherry blossoms photographed in the spring 2020 amid the Covid-19 crisis, was recently exhibited and collected in full by the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum. The book “A NEW RIVER” was published by bookshop M. She receipt the 37th Higashikawa New Photographer Award (2021). Iwane is currently based out of Tokyo.