Hiroshi Watanabe

Hiroshi Watanabe is a California-based Japanese photographer. Born in Sapporo, Hokkaido (Japan) in 1951, he graduated from Nihon University’s Department of Photography in 1975. He subsequently moved to Los Angeles, where he worked as a production coordinator for Japanese television commercials and later co-founded a Japanese coordination services company.
He received an MBA from UCLA in 1993. Two years later, he returned to his earlier photographic practice, and from 2000 onward has worked full-time as a photographer.
After publishing five self-produced books, Watanabe’s first traditionally published monograph, I See Angels Every Day, presents monochrome portraits of patients and daily life inside San Lázaro psychiatric hospital in Quito, Ecuador. The book was awarded the 2007 Photo City Sagamihara Award for Japanese professional photographers.
In 2005, a selection of his work was featured in Nueva Luz photographic journal (Vol. 10, No. 3). In 2007, he received the Critical Mass Award from Photolucida, which supported the publication of his monograph Findings.