Eriko Masaoka Japanese, b. 1983

Eriko Masaoka (b. 1983, Ehime, Japan) is a Japanese photographer living and working in France. She began photographing in her early twenties while travelling through small villages across Japan. She later lived on a ranch in Hokkaido and spent time with an Ainu community, experiences that profoundly shaped the development of her practice.

Working intuitively and without predetermined destinations, Masaoka photographs the people, animals, landscapes and everyday objects she encounters along her journeys. Her tactile black-and-white images, often marked by grain, darkness and movement, reflect an animistic worldview in which human and non-human life, nature and man-made objects are understood as possessing their own vitality and spirit.

Developed over the course of a decade, her series In the Flap of a Bird’s Wing, Water Dries Up was photographed across Japan, as well as in the Netherlands, Iceland and the Azores. The work considers the fragility and interconnectedness of life, transforming fleeting encounters into images that feel at once intimate, uncanny and alive. Her first monograph of the series was published by Libraryman in 2025.

Masaoka received the Grand Prix at the Higashikawa International Photo Festival’s Red Brick Portfolio Audition in 2016. Her major exhibitions include In the Flap of a Bird’s Wing, Water Dries Up, Kanzan Gallery / TSUBUTSUMI, Tokyo (2025); Emerging Artists, Irie Taikichi Memorial Museum of Photography, Nara (2023); and Pale Red Dot, VOID / Athens Photo Festival, Greece (2018).