Hiroshi Watanabe: The Day the Dam Collapses

Photographer Hiroshi Watanabe's digital pictures range from seemingly ordinary details of quotidian life to poetic visual metaphors. "Ominous and touching," The Day the Dam Collapses (sparked by the birth of the artist's son) paints the cycles of life as fleeting, fragile, and devastatingly ephemeral.—Hyperallergic

Born in Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan in 1951, Hiroshi Watanabe graduated from the Department of Photography of Nihon University in 1975. Watanabe moved to Los Angeles, where he worked as a production coordinator for Japanese television commercials and later co-founded a Japanese coordination services company. Watanabe obtained an MBA from the UCLA Anderson Business School in 1993. Two years later, however, his earlier interest in photography was revived, and Watanabe started to travel worldwide, extensively photographing what he found intriguing at each moment and place. As of 2000, Watanabe has worked full-time at photography.