Atsushi Fujiwara

 is a Japanese photographer. He is the co-founder of and the main contributor to the Japanese photo magazine "Asphalt". His work has been exhibited both in Japan and internationally.
Life and career.
Fujiwara was born in Okayama City in 1963. His family soon moved to Ōyamazaki (Kyoto), and moved again to Shiga when he was at primary school. He lived in Yasu (Shiga) until he was 26, and considers himself a native of Shiga.
After working as an interior designer, Fujiwara went to Britain in 1989, working as an architectural designer and in the restaurant business. Back in Japan, in 2005 he set up a photographic studio. A year later, he started out as a photographer, this unusually late start being helped by the photographers and Daidō Moriyama.
Together with the photographer Shin'ichirō Tōjinbara (), Fujiwara set out to create a photography magazine, "Asphalt", that would avoid the commercial priorities of mainstream Japanese photography and photography magazines, and that would run for just ten issues. From the second issue on, joined as editor, and the normal pattern was to combine work by Fujiwara, Tōjinbara and, as a guest photographer, someone who was not already a star but who instead merited exposure. These guest photographers included Yang Seungwoo () and Takehiko Nakafuji (). "Asphalt" is in the holdings of several art museums outside Japan, and its content is available online.
"Nangokusho: Ode to the Southern Lands of Japan" (2013) was the first of four photobooks by Fujiwara to be published by , each of these containing work in black and white. It borrows the title "Nangokushō" () from a collection of "tanka" by Fujiwara's grandfather, Tōmon Fujiwara (the pseudonym of Hiroji Fujiwara), who, after workplace conflicts elsewhere, had eventually settled down to a satisfying post as teacher in Kagoshima. The book presents photographs of Kagoshima from 2009 and 2010.
"Butterfly Had a Dream" shows the family life in Miyako-jima and the work and single life in Tokyo of a professional "kinbaku" practitioner. Her father, a suicide victim, had been a professional butterfly collector, and the book brings to mind the metamorphoses in the life of a butterfly.
As a child, Fujiwara had visited Nagashima Aiseien, a leper sanatorium, whose general manager was an uncle of his. He returned there 35 years later, influenced by Kaijin Akashi, who had been incarcerated there and had died there, but whose poems continued to express joy despite his loss of sight and other physical decay. For his book "Poet Island" (2015), Fujiwara photographed the sanatorium and depicted mementoes of Akashi's. Recommending an exhibition of these photographs at Zen Foto Gallery (Roppongi), Kōtarō Iizawa praised this and Fujiwara's two previous photobooks as of high quality.
"Semimaru" (2017) is named after that in turn is named after its main character. The book looks for traces of Semimaru on and elsewhere in what is now Shiga prefecture.