Norio Kobayashi

Norio Kobayashi (小林のりお) is a Japanese photographer born in 1952 in Ōdate City, Akita, Japan. He first picked up a camera when he was nine years old and later studied at Tokyo College of Photography. After graduating, he published his early work Landscapes in 1986 and won the Photographic Society of Japan’s award for new photographers, followed by the Kimura Ihei Prize in 1993 for First Light. Over his long career, Kobayashi’s work has included landscapes, digital experiments, and long-term projects like Japanese Blue, a thirty-year visual study of everyday blue tarps across Japan. He began working with digital photography in the late 1990s and continues to explore how everyday scenes reveal culture, time, and change. Kobayashi is also an emeritus professor at Musashino Art University and has exhibited widely in Japan and abroad. (Website, Instagram)