April 14, 2026 |
Fumiko Imano is an artist in the old-fashioned eccentric sense of the word: charming, quirky and impossible to put in a box. A stunning presence in a long dress, with a tousled black fringe, Imano has an aura that sits somewhere between a curious child and a benevolent grandmother. She could be five or 95; a fairylike enigma unstuck from time or place.
Station clock, Milan, 2023
In reality, she is in her early fifties. “And I feel like it too!” she says, with amusement. It’s a cold December afternoon in her favourite café in Nakano, the Tokyo neighbourhood where she lives.
Known for her whimsical self-portraits, which clone her into an imaginary pair of twins, Imano and her doppelgänger have appeared together in Japanese bathtubs, Parisian hotel rooms and on Icelandic glaciers, separated only by the subtle scissor-cuts that hint at the way she collages them together. The photos trill with the same naïveté and cheekiness that is also apparent in Imano’s gentle voice, which bubbles up into giggles easily and often.
She’s delightfully bonkers, too, in the way that all the best artists are. To our interview she has brought a nearly life-sized fox – Cookie – and a hopping mouse – Hoppy – which she plucks out of her handbag. She first started carrying a stuffed fox after she landed the job shooting Loewe’s campaigns under Jonathan Anderson from SS18 onwards. “I got it as an emotional support, because I needed something to fly together with me, and I was nervous before the shooting. The hotel was empty, so it kept me company,” she says.
Swing, Hitachi, Japan, 2006
Yo sign, New York City, 2016
Her first fox was called Major, a namesake that came from being on set: “Jonathan and Benjamin [Bruno, stylist] would always say ‘maaajorrrrr’ during the shoot,” she says with a laugh. She ended up working for Loewe for eight seasons, and in that time went from fringe artist to famous fashion photographer. Major recently retired from service after a nearly seven-year tenure, but Imano is still very active. She recently got back from a work trip to Antwerp and Paris, and her first cover for Vogue Japan has just dropped. “I call myself an artist because a photographer is more technical,” she says. “It’s more limited.”
There is very little about Imano that is limited, which has been the source of both happiness and suffering. Whether she has a menagerie of stuffed toys in tow or not, she is used to being thought of as strange. Born in Hitachi, a city two hours north of Tokyo, Imano was just two years old when her family moved to Brazil – as far away from Japan as it gets – and lived in Rio de Janeiro for six years. Her earliest memories there were happy. “I was in kindergarten in Brazil, and they were so kind to me there, maybe because I was a bit slow or weird,” she remembers. It wouldn’t last. “After kindergarten I started going to a Japanese school and the kids there were really mean to me. I’d ask to play with the others from my class in the jungle gym and they’d say ‘No!’ to me, so I’d sit and dig holes in the mud alone,” she says.
Ice cream, Antwerp, 2025
Imano returned to Japan when she was eight, but her home country felt alien to her. “I didn’t know anything about Japan, because I’d moved away when I was so young. I was quite isolated and lonely.” She was bullied again, mercilessly. “It was really horrible. Too harsh, and too funny in a way. But I couldn’t laugh about it,” she says. The bullying eventually stopped when she went to junior high school and lost seven kilos. “Everybody called me pig, so I tried to lose weight.” There is no bitterness in her voice as she says this; she just relays it as it happened.
The cruelty of other children served to amplify her sense of self as somebody who didn’t have to try and fit in and couldn’t anyway, even if she wanted to. “I’m thankful to the people who were mean to me, in some way, because that’s why I became an artist, you know? It made me realise I was different.” If those little bastards could see her now! “I wish I wasn’t a human being, in a way,” she says. “People see me like an alien, anyway.”
Party, London, 2000
Pizza, Paris, 2004
She moved to London when she was 23, enrolling in the fine art course at Central Saint Martins. It didn’t go as planned. “I got really lost, and they didn’t teach me anything, just one lecture and one tutorial [a week],” she says. In the first year of her BA, she made sculptures and a dress out of people’s hair in the student house she was living in. “Nobody liked it!” she says, laughing. It was after transferring to London College of Fashion to study styling and photography that she finally found her fellow aliens in her gay course mates, who quickly became her best friends. “In a way we had the same situation growing up, so we could relate to each other,” she says. “They were weirdos, like me.”
Eventually moving back to Japan after a stint living in Paris, she’s now based in Tokyo. Japanese society hasn’t bent to her will, exactly, but she’s found a way to be at peace with not fitting in, by using her background and work to lean into her differences rather than try to hide them. “In Japan I kind of feel like I’m gaijin [a foreigner],” she says with a chuckle. “And they just think of me as an artist, so finally, in a way, I got accepted.”
Swimming Pool, Nasu, Japan, 2010
Hollywood, Los Angeles, 2015
Still, as an artist she’s still doing her best to defy anything that might keep her pinned down. “I hate the word ‘express’,” she says. “I’m not really expressing myself, I’m just showing.” That purity is exactly why her work resonates. Her images show the tender relationship she has built with herself, and the resilience and joy she has found – not from other people, but from within. She smiles, her face innocent and totally free of inhibition. “You can’t prepare for magic,” she says. “You just have to let it happen.”
Sacré-Cœur, Paris, 2017
Fountain, Paris, 2015
Photography courtesy of Fumiko Imano. Taken from 10 Magazine Issue 76 – CREATIVITY, CHANGE, FREEDOM – out NOW. Order your copy here.
