Ayano Sudo

Ayano Sudo (須藤絢乃; born 1986) is a Japanese contemporary artist and photographer. She won the 2014 Canon New Cosmos Photography Competition and photographs professionally for Japanese magazines such as Spoon and FREECELL. Her works have been shown domestically in Japan and internationally and are included in the collections of museums such as the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum and the George Eastman Museum (Rochester, New York).

Early life Sudo was born and raised in Osaka, Japan, in 1986. Her first experience with photography began when she was seven years old, using a disposable camera to capture cats and images from Japanese magazines that she enjoyed.

She notes in an interview that Diane Arbus influenced her. In her youth, she loved Japanese fashion and Japanese shojo manga like The Rose of Versailles and Candy Candy. As an elementary school student, she aspired to become a shojo manga artist, and in her teens, she wanted to work as a fashion designer and photographer; both influences have made their way into her artistic aesthetic.

Gespenster Sudo's Gespenster series won the New Cosmos of Photography Grand Prize organized by Canon. She titled this series, Gespenster, from the German word for ghost, which she encountered while reading Junichiro Tanizaki's book The Makioka Sisters.

Holoholo Books in France published a photobook of her Gespenster series.

Critical reception In her essay, "Sudo Ayano's Portrait Photography: Artificially Modified Beauties and the Uncanny," Nava Astrachan critically analyzes Sudo's photographic portraits in various sociological, psychoanalytical, and historical contexts. Omokage, Autoscopy (Hillside Forum, Tokyo, Japan, 2015) I know something about love, Asian contemporary photography (Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Japan, 2018) New Planet Photo City – William Klein and Photographers Living in the 22nd Century (21_21 DESIGN SIGHT, Tokyo, 2018) Internet of (No) Things: Ubiquitous Networking and Artistic Intervention (Jogja National Museum, Yogyakarta, Indonesia, 2018) Self/Others (Canon Gallery, Tokyo, Japan, 2018)

Collections Sudo's work is held in the following permanent collections: Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Tokyo George Eastman Museum, Rochester, New York