Hiroyuki Nakamura was born in 1977 and grew up in a suburb of the small industrial city Hamamatsu in Japan. Like many Japanese children, Nakamura was fascinated with trains and at the early age of five he started to photograph this fascination in earnest. When he was eleven years old, Nakamura and his family moved to Chicago where he spent three years at a private Japanese middle school with the intent of returning to Japan for high school. During that time, Nakamura planned out a series of road trips with his family in order to photograph trains and the vast American landscape. By the end of middle school, Nakamura and his family had driven through most of the 50 states, an experience which Nakamura says certainly influenced his decision to stay in America when his parents returned to Japan.
Nakamura attended a public high school in Chicago for one year before transferring to a private military academy in Indiana. The school was founded in 1894 to prepare young cadets to attend schools like West Point, however, after the Vietnam War, it became just a regular prep school which still followed traditional military customs. As a result, Nakamura spent the next three years getting up 6:30 AM and following the basic military routine of spit shining his leather shoes, polishing his buckle, carrying a riffle, marching in rain or shine, folding the American flag, and attending religious services on Sunday. The experience was the polar opposite of the expansive America Nakamura had experienced during his road trips around the country and as a result, he started to view his image of America and life in general as more varied than could be captured in a photograph. He recounts that it was during this time that he started to feel that he didn’t “take” photos, but rather he “made” them.
After graduating, Nakamura moved to Philadelphia in 1996 and studied photography at Drexel University. While at Drexel, he started a series of what he called “one-of-a-kind” photographs in which he treated his printed paper negative as a canvas; drawing, scratching and adding other elements to create surrealistic mixed-media prints which he then enlarged. In 2000, he moved to New York City where he received his MFA in Photography in 2002 from the School of Visual Arts. While at SVA, Nakamura started moving more towards mixed media photography, until finally replacing the film negative altogether with canvas in 2004. Since then, Nakamura has been painting exclusively. Nakamura relocated to Japan from Brooklyn in 2016. He currently lives and works in Sapporo, Japan.