Shunji Dodo
Life and career. Dodo was born in Osaka in 1947. He graduated in fine arts from Kyushu Sangyo University in 1970, and started teaching at Tōkyō Shashin Senmon Gakkō (now Visual Arts College Tokyo). Two years later he started work as a teacher of photography at Ōsaka Shashin Senmon Gakkō; in 1998 he was made head of the school, by that time renamed Visual Arts College Osaka. Dodo was present when the film director Naomi Kawase, who had first been a student of his and was later teaching at Visual Arts Senmon Gakkō, had her first baby on  24 April 2004, in Nara. This was filmed as "Tarachime" () and Dodo photographed the event; the photographs were exhibited in Nara, Tokyo, and Locarno, and published as "Haha" (). Dodo's book of large-format black-and-white photographs "A Radiant Land: Kii Peninsula" won the PSJ's Annual Award for 1995; his later collection of large-format colour photographs of the peninsula, "A Radiant Land with Thousands of Years," was exhibited in Nara City Museum of Photography in 2000. The latter work also won him the Ina Nobuo Award in 1999. Dodo has said that his major influences were Shōmei  Tōmatsu, especially his Ryūkyū series "Pencil of the Sun", and Yutaka Takanashi, for the way in which Takanashi's concentration on Tokyo showed Dodo his own possibilities in Osaka. Among the photographers he admires are Robert Frank and William Klein.