David Akiba

Academic Division: Arts & HumanitiesDavid Akiba has been making photographs for over 5 decades. 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. 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. In 1985 he was selected to be one of five photographers who photographed the Elevated Orange Line between Forest Hills and downtown Boston before its planned demolition in l988. Akiba 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. Akiba''s “Light Struck” images were included in a group exhibition entitled “Luminous Form, Abstraction in Color Photography” at the DeCordova Museum 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. Also in 2012 Akiba conducted a successful Kickstarter campaign to make large panoramic prints of his landscape photographs that were exhibited at Alibi Fine Art Gallery in Chicago. He photographed the Boston Ballet “From the Wings” during its 50th anniversary season, 2013-14. A selection of the photographs was exhibited at the Chase Young Gallery in December 2014. Akiba lives in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts with his wife Jane. He has six children; Daniel, Jonah, Rachel, Samuel, Isaac and Abigail. There are 26 years between his oldest and youngest child. 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.” He teaches photography at Emerson College and Babson College.

Academic Degrees

• MFA, Rhode Island School of Design
• BA, University of Massachusetts - Amherst

Academic Interests

Chinese poetry from the Tang and Song Dynasties, Chinese and Japanese scroll painting, European History from WW1-WW2

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