A Photographic Life - 172: Plus Yukari Chikura

In episode 172 UNP founder and curator Grant Scott is in his shed reflecting on emotions and memory within photography, the importance of the family album and how life informs who we are and what we photograph. Plus this week photographer Yukari Chikura on the challenge of supplying Grant with an audio file no longer than 5 minutes in length in which she answer’s the question ‘What Does Photography Mean to You?’ Yukari Chikura was born in Tokyo, Japan. After graduating from Music University, she became a music composer, computer programmer, designer and photographer. As a young photographer Chikura has already won many prizes, among others the Photolucida Critical Mass Top50 Winner in 2016 and 2015, the International Photography Award and the Sony World Photography Awards. She has held solo exhibitions in Japan, and group exhibitions in museums and galleries worldwide. Her work is collected by the Griffin Photography Museum in US, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France and K*MoPA (the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts). Chikura is the winner of Steidl Book Award 2016 and her work from her series ZAIDO was published by STEIDL, in 2020.  Her work has been published in the New York Times and is held in collections including the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris and the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, Massachusetts. Chikura has been honored at the LensCulture Emerging Talent Awards, the International Photography Awards, Critical Mass and the Sony World Photography Awards, among others. In 2015 she was artist in residence at the Mt. Rokko International Photo Festival. http://yukari.chikura.me Dr. Grant Scott is the founder/curator of United Nations of Photography, a Senior Lecturer and Subject Co-ordinator: Photography at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, a working photographer, documentary filmmaker, BBC Radio contributor and the author of Professional Photography: The New Global Landscape Explained (Routledge 2014), The Essential Student Guide to Professional Photography (Routledge 2015), New Ways of Seeing: The Democratic Language of Photography (Routledge 2019). © Grant Scott 2021