Eduardo Fujii
Eduardo Fujii is a fine art photographer living on the beautiful Monterey Peninsula in California. At an early age in his native country Brazil, he demonstrated great interest in the arts. He started music lessons at the age of five followed by painting a few years later. It wasn’t until late 2006 in the United States, however, that he turned to photography as a form of artistic expression. Classical music and painting have been part of most of his life and have certainly contributed to the development of a lyrical sensibility that underlies his photography today. There is always a beautiful prelude playing on the back of his mind when photographing.
Despite his great passion for the arts, Eduardo chose to pursue a career in software engineering after completing 5 years of Engineering School in São Paulo, Brazil. In 1992, Eduardo came to the United States for graduate studies and landed in Monterey to pursue a master’s degree in Public Administration at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (MIIS). Having been awarded an internship at the United Nations, Eduardo moved temporarily to New York City. Moving back to Monterey in 1995, Eduardo was invited to work at MIIS Center for Nonproliferation Studies. Eduardo has been with MIIS since then.
Eduardo draws inspiration from various talented local photographers and also famous painters. Brigitte Carnochan, Elizabeth Opalenik, and Martha Casanave are just a few names of women photographers that had the most impact on Eduardo’s pursuit of a career in fine art photography. His images have a painterly look and reflect his continual pursuit of beauty. He is very committed to photography as art and always leaves part of himself in every image he makes. He truly believes that every photograph is a self-portrait.
Eduardo has participated in gallery exhibitions at the Center for Fine Art Photography in Fort Collins, Colorado, the Center for Photographic Art, the Cherry Center for the Arts, and Carmel Visual Arts in Carmel, California, the Museum of Monterey and Alvarado Gallery in Monterey, and has received various awards including Spotlight Awards from B&W Magazine and Color Magazine, PX3 Prix de la Photographie, Professional Photographer Magazine, Monochrome Awards, and the International Color Awards. One of Eduardo’s images was selected for the cover of Shadow & Light Magazine. In 2017, Eduardo was awarded Photographer of the Year at the 12th Annual Black and White Spider Awards.
Artist’s Statement
I like to call myself an” artist with a camera”. I do not care about equipment and I’m certainly not a latest-gadget kind of person. Currently, I am shooting with an obsolete digital camera but I have also used film, toy/plastic, and pinhole cameras. My final images never come straight from the camera. I have a need to impart something of me to my images, in effect making them self-portraits. Given my background in painting, I usually like images that have a painterly look. I am always trying to achieve that either in-camera using techniques such as panning, long exposures, and photographing through fog and smoke, or in post-production applying textures to images and giving them a cinematic effect in Photoshop.
I have always been interested in science and in particular quantum mechanics, a branch of physics that presents us with magical experiments that make us question fundamental concepts of the world we live in. Does reality exist when not being observed? Can our consciousness create reality? The reason-defying quantum theory seems to imply that our consciousness has the power to create and shape reality. The prevailing interpretation of quantum theory, the Copenhagen Interpretation devised by physicists Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in the 1920s, has long fascinated philosophers and physicists alike. It states that by the very act of watching, the observer affects reality. The double slit experiment for example has shown that quantum particles exhibit different behavior when going through a double slit barrier depending on whether or not they are being observed or monitored. Results that could not be explained by classical physics led scientists to theorize that particles could go back in time and change the path they took going through the slits. Quantum tunneling, superposition and entanglement are other fascinating concepts of quantum mechanics that defy logic and make us question if this is actually science fiction.
Quantum mechanics has never been more relevant than now. Quantum computers are right around the corner. Big tech companies and top universities have already built prototypes of the next generation of computing power that will be capable of solving complex problems beyond the capability of today’s classical computers.
I also like to take photos of ballet dancers in rehearsal using long exposures to get that desired painterly look. So, I decided to combine both passions, dancing and science, and the “Uncertain Nature of Reality” body of work was born. The work consists of images of ballet dancers collaged in such a way to remind us of a concept inspired by the quirky laws of quantum mechanics.