Artist Statement
I have come to deeply appreciate the camera's singular manner of rendering space on a flat surface. It has taught me to see the world more acutely,more joyfully. If the photograph is honest,the viewer may travel on a parallel path to its axis of feeling. There is no certainty of meaning, only the possibility of sharing a living moment. Process Statement
Black and white and color negative film made into silver prints and C-prints. digital prints made from film scans.

 

 

David Akiba has been making photographs for 45 years. His work is in the collections of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Library of Congress, the Fogg Art Museum, the Brooklyn Art Museum the DeCordova Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art The Museum of Modern Art, the Boston Public Library and other public and private collections. He received his Master of Fine Arts degree from the Rhode Island School of Design where he studied with Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind.
Akiba lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts with his wife Jane. He has six children; Daniel, Jonah, Rachel, Samuel, Isaac and Abigail. The oldest is 42, the youngest is 15. He has been a parent of young children since 1971, and has created a chronicle of his family life, consisting of 2,500 black and white photographs. Some have been exhibited under the title “A Separate Journey.”
In l985 Akiba won a MassProductions grant that allowed him to photograph for two years in Frederick Law Olmsted’s Emerald Necklace park system. It led to a solo exhibition of the photographs at the Photographic Resource Center in 1987. Also in 1985 he was selected to be one of five photographer who photographed the Elevated Orange Line between Forest Hills and downtown Boston before its planned demolition in l988.
He had a ten-year retrospective exhibition of his landscape photographs at the Rose Art Museum in 1992, and a major exhibition of his work covering almost thirty years at the Wiggin Gallery of the Boston Public Library in 1998-99. A solo exhibition of his family photographs entitled “A Separate Journey” was exhibited In New York City at the 92nd Street Y in 2007. His “Light Struck” images were included in a group exhibition entitled “Luminous Form, Abstraction in Color Photography” at the DeCordova Museum in 2007. In 2012, forty of his winter landscape photographs were exhibited at the Milton Weill Gallery of the 92nd Street Y in New York City.
He teaches photography at Emerson College and Babson College.