Miho Kajioka (b. 1973, Japan, currently lives in Paris) studied fine art at the San Francisco Art Institute and began there as a painting major, but she eventually turned to photography. She finished her fine arts degree in Montreal, Canada. However, she began her career as a journalist, producing TV news and documentary programs for foreign news outlets, and didn’t produce art for more than 10 years.

It was after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami that Kajioka was reconnected to photographic art. Two months after the disaster, while reporting in the coastal city of Kamaishi, where over 800 people died, she found roses blooming beside a blasted building. That mixture of grace and ruin made her think of a Japanese poem:

In the spring, cherry blossoms,

In the summer the cuckoo,

In autumn the moon, and in

Winter the snow, clear, cold.

Written by the Zen monk Dogen, the poem describes the fleeting, fragile beauty of the changing seasons. The roses Kajioka saw in Kamaishi bloomed simply because it was spring. That beautiful and uncomplicated statement, made by roses in the midst of ruin, impressed her, and brought her back to photography.

Kajioka's artistic practice is in principal snapshot based; she carries her camera everywhere and intuitively takes photos of whatever she finds interesting. These collected images serve as the basic material for her work in the darkroom where she creates her poetic and suggestive image-objects through elaborate, alternative printing methods. Kajioka regards herself more as a painter/drawer than as a photographer. She feels that photographic techniques help her to create works that fully express her artistic vision. Her images evoke a sense of mystery in her constant search for beauty. The focused, creative and respectful way in which she uses the medium of photography to creating her works seems to fit in the tradition of Japanese art that is characterised by the specifically Japanese sense of beauty, wabi-sabi. 

In her series 'so it goes', Kajioka presents works relating to the concepts of time, memory and place. As in her previous works, ‘so it goes’ reveals intuitive images of fragments of daily life at different times. It was while reading Kurt Vonnegut's novel, Slaughterhouse Five, that Kajioka became really interested in this subject. Kajioka has long been fascinated by the chronology and meaning of events. According to her, photography captures moments and freezes them; printing impressions is like playing with the sense of time and getting lost in its timeline.

Since 2013 Kajioka's work has been exhibited in France, the Netherlands, Colombia, the United Kingdom, Italy, Germany and Spain. Kajioka's book 'so it goes', co-published by the (M)éditions and IBASHO, was awarded the 'Prix Nadar' in 2019. In 2022, her new book "And, do you still hear the peacocks?" was pusblished again by the (M)éditions and IBASHO.