When Akari Takenobu was alone at home as a child, she heard strange sounds throughout her house. These memories haunt her art, including “Threshold,” the series that earned Takenobu, a master’s student at Tokyo University of the Arts, the 2026 Dior Beauty Photography and Visual Arts Award for Young Talents, presented each year during Les Rencontres d’Arles, the French city’s half-century-old photography festival.
“Threshold” comprises a series of black-and-white self-portraits in which Takenobu never reveals her face. She photographs her body, cuts the images apart, and reassembles them into biomorphic shapes that hover in the uncanny space between the natural and the supernatural. “Akari’s work immediately captivated me with its unique aesthetic power, blending an almost vintage, Man Ray–esque quality with a distinctly contemporary sensibility,” says Peter Philips, Creative and Image Director for Dior Makeup.
Takenobu was selected by a jury led by British photographer David Sims and including photographer Vasantha Yogananthan, Maison Européenne de la Photographie director Julie Jones, LUMA Arles founder Maja Hoffmann, and Philips. In Arles in July, Takenobu spoke with CULTURED about haunted houses, infrared photography, and the limits of the human senses.
Describe your work in a few words.
Simulated. Staged. In pursuit of the invisible.
How did ideas of uncanny spaces and haunting enter your life?
When I was a child, I lived in a house that some might describe as haunted. I would hear sounds when no one else was there, and although those moments frightened me, they also stayed with me very deeply. As an only child, I often felt alone, yet at the same time I had the distinct sensation of sharing that space with an unseen presence. I want to create a space in which the unknown can remain unresolved yet felt.
Why do you use your own body in your work?
I begin with my own body as a symbol of physicality, materiality, and human presence. Once photographed, the body becomes an image and loses some of its physical reality. I then fragment and reconstruct that image, creating a figure that remains visible but is no longer fully embodied. Through this process, I try to move closer to something ghostlike and give form to its ambiguity.
You have also worked with infrared light. What does it allow you to see?
I am drawn to frequencies and phenomena that exist beyond the limits of human perception because they suggest that reality extends far beyond what we can immediately verify. Infrared makes visible a spectrum that is present but inaccessible to the naked eye. It offers a way of thinking about visibility not as something fixed, but as something contingent and incomplete.
Through your work, what is the invisible?
I don’t know yet, and accepting that uncertainty is essential to my practice.
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