Anna Onishi – Portrait of a Photographer

Matt Payne

Matt Payne is a landscape photographer and mountain climber from Durango, Colorado. He’s the host of the weekly landscape photography podcast, “F-Stop Collaborate and Listen,” co-founder of the Nature First Photography Alliance, and co-founder of the Natural Landscape Photography Awards. He lives with his wife, Angela, his son Quinn, and his four cats, Juju, Chara, Arrow, and Vestal.

mattpaynephotography.com

Have you ever found yourself wondering why you were born, or what you are actually living for? These are the kinds of questions most people push aside in the name of routine, although for Anna Onishi, they lingered persistently, rising and falling like waves until she could no longer ignore them.

In the search for something that might bring meaning back into her life, she spent a year writing down everything that resonated with her: what she loved, what she wanted to try, what might move her again. At the end of that personal inventory, she arrived at a simple and powerful realization: she wanted to photograph whatever stirred her heart.

What Anna found, almost immediately, was that photography allowed her to translate emotion into form. Since 2015, she has created images that speak with a quiet eloquence. They reveal a photographer who sees the world not as a collection of grand scenes, but as a series of delicate conversations between color, light, and the subtle gestures of nature.

In this essay, I want to explore how Anna’s photographs work on us gently yet decisively. Three qualities stand out: her use of form and color to shape mood, the distinctly feminine sensibility that guides her choices, and the unique sense of place and story that emerges from even her quietest frames.