Fumi Nagasaka was born in Nagoya, Japan in 1980. She moved to New York in 2001 to study English and find out what she wanted to do with life. In 2003 she began shooting for Japanese cult magazine STREET, and started traveling around Europe. She began shooting her own stories in 2007 for fashion magazines, such as Dazed & Confused UK/Japan, Tank, and Placed.

Her work has a classic, grainy, almost sixties feel. Her snapshot aesthetic, essentially concerned with capturing the often missed beauty in the real, projects a strong sense of hyper-reality; with her images often feeling as though they could just as easily have been discovered on some long lost reel of film belonging to the likes of Scorcese or Warhol.

That is not to say the work is in any sense stylistically retro or contrived. On the contrary Fumi's photographs are candid, real and wholly contemporaneous. It's just that they contain a strange and overarching sense of otherworldliness that lends them something akin to movie scene impact; think scenes from Drugstore Cowboy shot by David Lynch at The Chelsea Hotel and you are kind of getting there. It is not hard to see the strong influence of her hero Nan Goldin in the work but essentially Fumi is re-interpreting Goldin's practice for a whole new generation; capturing the new wave that is currently crashing mercilessly down upon the clubs, sidewalks and tenement buildings of the western world.

Fumi is currently based in New York, living in Williamsburg. She is a regular contributer of dazeddigital.com and Nylon Japan.