Shigeta Kobayashi is a photographer based in Saitama, Japan. He graduated from Chuo university with a degree in civil engineering and worked for a commercial photography studio before becoming a freelance photographer in 2014. Although his initial focus was on commercial photography, he began to think deeply about his personal work. Around this time period, he started to learn the artworks of photographers such as Michael Schmidt, Robert Adams, and Masaru Tatsuki, and it led him to develop his interest in fine art photography. In 2017, he decided to pursue his career as an artist. In 2020, he exhibited cairn, a body of work which marked a major stepping stone of his career. The work was created with a theme which investigated to confirm his own identity, which had become unstable after the birth of his child with his wife, during a month-long residency in Iceland, and through the physical act of "walking" in an unknown place, he felt that the medium of photography remains as proof of his existence. He published the photobook of 300 copies. This work became the impetus for his current works, in which he focuses on the traces of nature and human activities that appear in spaces. Through his researches into the geological events and human activities on the land, he attempts to create images that can be only imagined otherwise. He has been involved in both public and private programs, such as The Kumonodaira Mountain Hut Artist-in-Residence program at the mountain lodge in the Japanese Northern Alps in 2022. He also launched books cairn, artist collective, with a graphic designer Koji Miyazoe, which carry his own photobooks and books that are designed by Miyazoe at art book fairs and events.
