Hajime SAWATARI 沢渡朔
(b. 1940, Tokyo, Japan)

Hajime Sawatari is a celebrated fashion and advertising photographer. His photobooks are part of the important cultural renaissance that took place in Japan in the 1960s and '70s and vitnessed the promotion of provocative, avant-garde book publishing. Sawatari won the Japan Photograph Association's 'Nendo Sho' award for Nadia in 1973. Later on he joined Yoshihiro Tatsuki and Shunji Ōkura to produce a series that was furiously creative and that moved away from the staid conventions of so-called 'talent' books being published in Japan at this time. The Private series revealed an intimate, personal, highly emotional relationship between the photographer and his female subject. Photographed outdoors, Sawatari's nude is tangible and human, rather than aloof and unattainable.