Tomio Seike

Seike is primarily known for his black and white photographs handprinted in Japan, though he has also made landscapes in colour. His sensitive play on light and composition adds a serenity to his images which defines his style and adds a beauty to scenes of everyday life. Tomio Seike remains one of Hamiltons Gallery’s longest standing represented artists.

 

 

This sensitivity comes across most effectively in his pictures of female nudes. These have an other-worldliness and mild abstraction; a quality that prevails throughout his work. Indeed, he manages to capture the quiet moments in life most people fail to notice by expertly balancing between the abstract and traditional, using only natural light. 

 

“I was never interested in taking pictures of models or well-known individuals, I prefer ordinary people in ordinary situations, as you see every day and every moment - nothing special.” – Tomio Seike 

 

Seike’s exquisite small format works further highlight the intimacy of the scenes he captures through their format, forcing the viewing to get up close to absorb every detail.

 

Towards the end of the eighties when Seike completed his first series of nudes, exhibited at Hamiltons in 1989, he decided to extend the series - shooting in Paris and the UK - and experimenting predominantly with abstraction and size.