Taisuke Nakano is a Japanese photographer born in 1994 and based in Tokyo. He graduated from the Department of Imaging Arts and Sciences at Musashino Art University in 2017, where he became interested in constructing photographic narratives through chains of visual association. His work often explores the body, sexuality, identity, desire, and the unstable boundaries between the self and others.
In 2018, Nakano received the Grand Prize in the 18th 1_WALL Photography Competition for a project examining the tension within his family after he came out about his sexuality. His series Gentle Swamp later received an Excellence Award at the 44th Canon New Cosmos of Photography in 2021, selected by Ryan McGinley. In 2025, he won the fifth Fugensha Photo Award Grand Prix for the project that became Spin around the Night Consumed by the Fire.
His book Spin around the Night Consumed by the Fire (Fugensha, 2026) began when he learned that the perpetrator of a 2000 murder of a gay man in a Tokyo cruising park had exactly the same name as him. Instead of reconstructing the case, he combined photographs from cruising parks, abandoned stone quarries, staged male bodies and landscapes with images from infrared trail cameras. The 248-page book, designed by Aaron Nieh, contains 151 photographs. (Website, Instagram)
