From an early age, Fumiko Imano has felt, in her own words, as an "alien." Coming from a Japanese family, she spent her early years in a country totally opposite to that of her parents, Brazil. At the age of 8, once she moved to her native country, she discovered that she wasn’t comfortable in the place that was supposed to be her home. This generated her enough solitude on top of an identity crisis. As an adult, she moved to London to study fashion photography, a discipline that requires first of all knowing how to work in a team, something that did not go well with Fumiko's character, who was too possessive of her work. This is how she ended up becoming a model, stylist and photographer, all at once. And as if this weren’t enough, she added to a fictional twin sister whom she’d also photograph.
FUMIKO IMANO, THE THERAPY OF SELF-PORTRAITS
The artist Fumiko Imano is not only known for her self-portraits, but also for a photographic discourse created from her supposed twin sister. And we say supposed because it is imaginary. She appears with her in her photographs, in what has been for many years an introspective therapeutic exercise, which has curiously catapulted her to the outside world. Until not very long ago, when she started working on more collaborative projects for brands like Loewe, or more recently for Kiko Kostadinov x ASICS.
Against all odds, Fumiko published ten solo photobooks (in all aspects) before deciding that it was time to open her field of vision a bit, to work as a team and to start working on collaborative projects. One of her most popular ones is the one she did with Loewe, which started when she did the Spring / Summer 2018 campaign. The most recent one has been Kiko Kostadinov x ASICS women's line campaign, in which she was given total freedom. And as she considers herself a “hikikomori” (or a hermit who never leaves the house), she decided to take the photographs at her parents' house, again, all by herself, next to her doppelgänger.
