Works
  • Eriko Masaoka, In the Flap of a Bird's Wing, Water Dries Up, 2009
    In the Flap of a Bird's Wing, Water Dries Up, 2009
  • Eriko Masaoka, In the Flap of a Bird's Wing, Water Dries Up, 2009
    In the Flap of a Bird's Wing, Water Dries Up, 2009
  • Eriko Masaoka, In the Flap of a Bird's Wing, Water Dries up, 2009
    In the Flap of a Bird's Wing, Water Dries up, 2009
  • Eriko Masaoka, In the Flap of a Bird's Wing, Water Dries Up, 2009
    In the Flap of a Bird's Wing, Water Dries Up, 2009
  • Eriko Masaoka, In the Flap of a Bird's Wing, Water Dries Up, 2009
    In the Flap of a Bird's Wing, Water Dries Up, 2009
  • Eriko Masaoka, In the Flap of a Bird's Wing, Water Dries Up, 2009
    In the Flap of a Bird's Wing, Water Dries Up, 2009
  • Eriko Masaoka, In the Flap of a Bird's Wing, Water Dries Up, 2009
    In the Flap of a Bird's Wing, Water Dries Up, 2009
  • Eriko Masaoka, In the Flap of a Bird's Wing, Water Dries Up, 2009
    In the Flap of a Bird's Wing, Water Dries Up, 2009
  • Eriko Masaoka, In the Flap of a Bird's Wing, Water Dries Up, 2008
    In the Flap of a Bird's Wing, Water Dries Up, 2008
  • Eriko Masaoka, In the Flap of a Bird's Wing, Water Dries Up, 2008
    In the Flap of a Bird's Wing, Water Dries Up, 2008
  • Eriko Masaoka, In the Flap of a Bird's Wing, Water Dries Up, 2008
    In the Flap of a Bird's Wing, Water Dries Up, 2008
  • Eriko Masaoka, In the Flap of a Bird's Wing, Water Dries Up, 2007
    In the Flap of a Bird's Wing, Water Dries Up, 2007
  • Eriko Masaoka, In the Flap of a Bird's Wing, Water Dries Up", 2007
    In the Flap of a Bird's Wing, Water Dries Up", 2007
  • Eriko Masaoka, In the Flap of a Bird's Wing, Water Dries Up, 2005
    In the Flap of a Bird's Wing, Water Dries Up, 2005
  • Eriko Masaoka, In the Flap of a Bird's Wing, Water Dries Up, 2004
    In the Flap of a Bird's Wing, Water Dries Up, 2004
Biography
View works. Eriko Masaoka, In the Flap of a Bird's Wing, Water Dries Up, 2009
In the Flap of a Bird's Wing, Water Dries Up, 2009
View works

Eriko Masaoka (b. 1983, Ehime, Japan) is a Japanese photographer living and working in France. Her black-and-white photographs attend to the quiet but charged presence of people, animals, landscapes and everyday objects, tracing the delicate thresholds between life, death and transformation.

 

Masaoka began her long-running series In the Flap of a Bird’s Wing, Water Dries Up in 2005, following her graduation from Visual Arts Osaka. Made across remote regions of Japan and during travels abroad, the work is informed by an intuitive, animistic sensitivity: a recognition of vitality and spirit in all things, whether animate or inanimate. Her images are tactile and deeply physical, often marked by grain, darkness and movement, and invite the viewer into a world in which the ordinary becomes uncanny and alive.

 

Masaoka received the Grand Prize at the Higashikawa International Photo Festival’s Red Brick Warehouse Portfolio Audition in 2016, and has exhibited at the Tokyo Institute of Photography, Kanzan Gallery, Athens Photo Festival and the Irie Taikichi Memorial Museum of Photography in Nara. Her first monograph, In the Flap of a Bird’s Wing, Water Dries Up, was published by Libraryman in 2025.

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