Born in 1980, Lieko Shiga is a Japanese Photographer who studied at Londons Chelsea college of art and design and graduated in 2004 with a bachelor’s degree. I found her from a page on twitter who archives interesting images and fashion. The image I saw I had recognized from the subreddit cursed images that contain a variety of user-submitted photos found across the internet that all have some eerie unexplainable quality to them. Most of Lieko Shiga’s work would fit right in on that subreddit. For her first two publications,

she used strictly film cameras but as time went on began to incorporate digital as well. In an interview, I found done in 2008 after she had released her second book titled canary She stated that all of her effects besides a single photo are done in-camera. A technique I found interesting was she reshoots prints of photographs to give them an extra surreal quality. The scenarios she sets up and shoots are very interesting. The interplay between her and the subject of the photos is what I think makes them so surreal. I have compiled some photos from her older works done from 2002-2010. These photographs all use a combination of abstraction and color to unsettle the person viewing the photograph. Each feels like a vivid fever dream or a bad drug experience. The way she blurs the line between reality and the fictional world she creates within the lens of her camera is what makes her one of my greatest inspirations thus far.