Farmer Improvisation

• Prize
  Gold in Advertising/Self-Promotion
• Photographer
  Masumi Shiohara

I am a fruit farmer. I'm also a breeder. Every day I fantasize about the fruits of my labor. During this time, I created five objects using fruits that came to me. For the grapes, I tried to create a variety that is impossible to breed. As for Buddha's Hand, I made a portrait of three of them side by side. For the pears, I cut two pears in half, one horizontally and one vertically, and put them together to create a work that was in focus from front to back.

Masumi Shiohara was born in 1974 in Nagano, Japan. He worked at a micro-machining company as a development engineer. After leaving the company, he took over the management of the family orchard from his parents and is now running a farm. While growing fruit here he became interested in capturing them into works of photographic art, a skill which he picked up by himself. The inspiration to capture these photographically originally came when he was requested to supply fruit on a branch to a botanical artist