Norio Kobayashi is a Japanese photographer. He was born in 1952 in Ōdate, Akita. He got his first camera at nine years old. In 1983 he graduated from the Tokyo College of Photography. He is now an emeritus professor at Musashino Art University.
His book Landscapes (1986) won the Photographic Society of Japan's award for new photographers in 1987. His book First Light won the Kimura Ihei Prize in 1993. He began working with digital photography in 1997.
His book Japanese Blue was published by AKAAKA Art Publishing in 2025. It has 128 pages. It collects more than three decades of photographs of everyday blue tarps in Japan, made from 1991 to 2024 on medium-format film and digitally.
