Hiroyo Kaneko

© Hiroyo Kaneko Hiroyo Kaneko has just been awarded the 2009 Santa Fe Prize for Photography for her series Sentimental Education. The series is a study of her family bathing in Japan's sento (public baths). I was taken with the simplicity and directness of these images, which feel contemplative without being overly lyrical.

It is interesting to see that at least two young Japanese photographers are receiving plaudits for their work around the family (Asashi Masada recently won the excellent Kimura Ihee Award for his 2008 book in which he cleverly reworked the idea of the traditional family portrait). In an age when the institution of the Japanese family is said to be in freefall, it is interesting to see that, in some photographic quarters at least, it is alive and well.

Osamu James Nakagawa

© Osamu James Nakagawa The Japanese-American photographer Osamu James Nakagawa has just been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship to support his work on the Banta and Gama series. With Banta, Nakagawa explores the scars of the Pacific War opposing Japan to America on the cliffs of the island of Okinawa. I was intrigued by the format (which doesn't translate well on a screen) and the fact that these seemingly classic landscape photographs have been "digitally-manipulated" (I would be interested to know how).