A Chinese girl plays at her parents’ restaurant, deserted on Christmas eve, in Niagara Falls, New York. (1995)
Takaaki Iwabu is a photo editor at Bloomberg. He works at the Bloomberg’s Tokyo Bureau. After working in the United States as a newspaper photographer for nearly 20 years, he returned to his hometown in Yokohama in 2013. For about 3 years, he worked as a producer for the Newsline, an hourly news program broadcast by NHK World. He joined Bloomberg’s Asia photo desk 7 years ago. Iwabu was a staff photographer with The Niagara Gazette in Niagara Falls, New York, The State Newspaper in Columbia, South Carolina, and The News & Observer in Raleigh, North Carolina. He is a graduate of Nihon University with B.A. in International Relations, and Marshall University with M.A. in Journalism. He has won more than 50 photography awards, including the Society of Newspaper Design’s Silver Award and the Asian American Journalists Association’s National Award in Photography. He was twice named South Carolina Newspaper Photographer of the Year.
Quick links to POY Asia 2023 Judges: Zhou Yang / Takaaki Iwabu / Uma Bista / Ki-Ho Park / Parisa Azadi / Willy Kurniawan / Suzanne Lee / Jilson Tiu / Sandipa Malakar / Nathan Tsui
Police officers on alert as a public screen in Tokyo shows Japanese Emperor Akihito delivering his abdication speech. He was the first monarch to abdicate in 200 years. (2019)
"Among many things, aesthetic perfection and ambiguity are the qualities I look for in photographs. It is all about evoking emotion, and possibly encouraging contemplation and dialogue."
Takaaki Iwabu
Carlos Ghosn sits in his lawyer’s vehicle in Tokyo on the day he was released from a jail. Six month later, the fallen automotive titan, who was facing trial for financial crimes, fled to Lebanon to escape what he called Japan’s “rigged” justice system. (2019)
Morning commuters walk across a snow-covered field in the central business district in Tokyo. (2018)
