Logan Willis - Weekly Artist Post #8

Miho Aikawa

1) Miho Aikawa is a photographer who was born in Japan and is currently based in Tokyo and NY. This particular group of work is called "Dinner in NY". In this project, Miho takes pictures of people eating dinner. She focuses on showing how different the experience is for each person. Technically, Miho takes pictures with what looks like a light source that she is adding to each scene such as a lamp, flash light, or some other added light source. She also takes most pictures with the subjects focused on primarily the left or right side of the frame. She also focuses on zoomed in subjects and a somewhat shallow depth of field. In most of the pictures in this group of work there is a shallow depth of field that doesn't extend past the room itself that the picture is being taken in.

2) Miho Aikawa focuses on all sorts of subjects in her works. In this work particularly, she focuses on people, color, and light. She also photographs landscapes/cityscapes, still moments, and interior scenes. In the pictures in this work, Miho focuses on color contrast, shadows and highlights, and location of the scenes being captured. She focuses on including enough of the surrounding background while also focusing on the main subject(s) in the photographs. I really like Miho’s pieces because she shows scenes of everyday life and is focusing on one time during each day that people are typically doing the same thing in different environments in different locations. 

3) The works in “Dinner in NY” were my favorite because they were highly saturated pictures that included items that I enjoy photographing sometimes such as food, people enjoying a drink or two, animals, but most interesting to me was the way Miho captured the layout of each room which made me want to ask more questions about the people as well as the room. I imagined the rest of their apartment, or the rest of their home, what colors the other rooms might be, what might come next, etc. I wanted to imagine the rest of these people’s homes after looking at these pictures and I love the way the lighting looks similar in each situation while we know there is different lighting in each situation, as they’re all in different locations. I also thought that Miho’s idea to examine this time in everyone’s daily routine as very interesting and intriguing.