Life Studies

Life Studies is a photobook by Aya Fujioka built from snapshots she took over about five years in New York, starting in 2007, and edited long after she came home. Published by Akaaka Art Publishing in 2025, it holds 168 color and black-and-white photographs and closes with a long text by the artist.

The story behind the book

Fujioka went to New York in 2007 on an overseas study program of Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs and returned to Japan in 2012. Years later she went back to the pictures, looking at them again and weaving them into a book. She has called them reflections of her own guts, the struggles and conflicts she carried at the time.

The book opens on the street, wanders the city with the eyes of an immigrant, and ends in quiet, private moments. Between her room and the street, it gathers light and noise, people adrift from society, and faces where gender blurs. The publisher describes it as showing the core of her practice, where art and life cannot be pulled apart.

What is in the book

• 168 photographs in color and black and white
• A long text by Fujioka at the end, moving between fact and fiction
• Swiss binding (codex)

About Aya Fujioka

Born in 1972 in Hiroshima, Fujioka studied photography at Nihon University College of Art and later studied at the language center of National Taiwan Normal University in Taipei. Her work Here Goes River, on Hiroshima seventy years after the war, received the Ina Nobuo Award (2016), and in 2018 she received both the Tadahiko Hayashi Award and the Kimura Ihei Award. Her work is in the collections of SFMOMA and the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa.