COMING HOME

The photography of
MICHIO HOSHINO


About Michio

Michio Hoshino was born in Chiba Prefecture, Japan on September 27, 1952. At the age of 16, he spent a summer hitchhiking through the United States, Mexico, and Canada. Years later, Michio encountered a copy of Alaska, published by the National Geographic Society, and found himself turning again and again to an aerial photograph of the small western Alaskan village of Shishmaref. Intrigued by this village, no more than a dot amidst the vast sky, land, and sea, Michio determined to see this landscape for himself. In the summer of 1973 he spent three months with an Eskimo family in Shishmaref and after completing his degree at Keio University came back to Alaska to begin a nineteen-year journey as a photographer of northern landscapes, wildlife, and peoples.

Fifteen photo and essay collections were published in his lifetime. Michio's photographs have appeared in American journals such as National Geographic, Geo, and Audubon. In 1986 Michio won the Anima Prize for Wildlife Photography, and in 1990 he was awarded the Kimura Ihei Prize, the highest recognition for photographic art in Japan.

On August 8, 1996 Michio was pulled from his tent and killed by a brown bear at Kurilskoya Lake, a remote brown bear refuge in southern Kamchatka. There are all kinds of people and there are all kinds of bears. The gifts of Michio's photography live on.

- Karen Colligan-Taylor