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There is a photograph Isamu Sawa took when he was nine years old. A duck, on a pond, in Cook's Park in the central New South Wales town of Orange. It was the first frame on the first roll of film he ever shot, on a Yashica 35 rangefinder his father had just put in his hands. His dad developed it, entered it in a youth photography competition, and the boy won.
Sawa is the first to puncture the legend. He won because he was the only entry in his age bracket. But a win is a win, and a kid who spends his nights watching his father turn the family kitchen into a darkroom, waiting for the sun to go down so the developing could begin, is a kid who is already gone. By thirteen he was processing and printing his own work and picking up assignments from the local paper. The editor there started handing him projects. In Orange they called him the Little Shutter Bug, and the name stuck because he carried the camera everywhere.
The father is the spine of this whole story. Peter Sawa was a pipe organ builder by trade, and it was that skill that sponsored the family out of Japan to Australia when Isamu was nine. When the organ company folded, Peter went back to his first career, photography, and started shooting for local newspapers. He is the one who put the camera in the boy's hand. He is also the one who gave the warning that hangs over everything that came after. Don't ever become a professional photographer, he told his son. There's no money in it.
So Isamu planned to be a lawyer. He skipped photography in high school because he already knew more than the teacher could give him, no offence intended, and loaded up on maths, accounting and legal studies instead. He wanted law and arts at Monash. His marks weren't quite there, and the preferences got shuffled, and he landed in a Bachelor of Arts in photography at RMIT instead. Fate does its work in the cracks between what you planned and what you settled for.
The detail that makes the RMIT years worth telling is this: while Isamu was assembling his application folio, his father decided to apply too. Peter was fifty by then and thinking he might teach photography one day, which meant he might need the degree to do it. Isamu didn't think a university would take a fifty year old man. The university took him. So father and son went through the first two years of art school together, side by side, which is either the warmest or the strangest thing you'll read about a photography degree this year.
Isamu never finished it. During the holidays after second year he picked up studio work assisting a photographer named Greg Delves, who would later build a serious still life career in New York. The studio Delves worked out of belonged to John Gollings, the most influential architectural photographer in the country. Gollings needed a new full time assistant. He asked the twenty year old if he was interested. Isamu wasn't having a great time at uni anyway. The course was heavily art based and he just wanted to be a photojournalist like his dad. He said yes.
What he found at Gollings' studio was not a year of carrying bags. Gollings had just landed a large account with the Japanese department store Daimaru, and for weeks the two of them stood in the studio shooting product. Gollings ran two setups at once and put Isamu in charge of one of them. The kid would light it, shoot a Polaroid, walk it over for inspection, take the notes, change this, change that, and do it again. He wasn't a lackey learning to load film. He was shooting alongside a master, lighting everything from clothing to reflective objects to whatever the brief threw at them. That, he says, is where he learned the craft of still life.
The irony is thick enough to cut. At RMIT, Isamu nearly failed still life. He hated it. Still life is now the thing he is known for, the genre at the centre of his fine art practice. Gollings had a two year rule for assistants, and when Isamu's time was up the choice was to assist somebody else or back himself. He backed himself. Gollings handed him an office in his St Kilda studio, and in 1996 Isamu Sawa started shooting under his own name.
The rock and roll years
Rewind a year, to before Gollings, to a nineteen year old superfan at a CD launch. The guitarist was Tommy Emmanuel. Isamu brought his camera, shot the set, then queued up to get his CD signed. Emmanuel, who misses nothing, asked the kid whether he'd got anything good, handed him a card, and told him to send through whatever he had. Of course Isamu did. A few months later the phone rang at his family home and it was Emmanuel, inviting him to come hang out at his shows the following year.
That one card opened a door into the whole Australian rock and roll scene. Through Emmanuel, Isamu met bands like Hunters & Collectors and, improbably, Neil Diamond's official concert photographer. He started shooting for record companies, then album covers. It ran for six or seven years and made the first real chapter of his professional life. For a young photographer who'd grown up wanting to be his father, the documentary photojournalist, this was as close as the job ever got to the dream.
The pivot into cars came by accident, the way most of the good turns in this story do. Isamu was still picking up commercial still life work when a client asked him to shoot an engine for Holden, the Australian arm of General Motors. They liked the engine. Had he ever thought about shooting whole cars? He'd loved cars his whole life and collected the magazines, but car photography is a specialised, brutal corner of the industry. He quoted against two established specialists, won the job, and kept winning. For about fifteen years he was one of the top ten car photographers in the country, shooting the major campaigns, including the three month marathon of the VF Commodore launch in 2013, the last great Commodore Holden ever released.
Then Holden shut its Australian manufacturing down, and half his business vanished with it. Isamu went back to still life, which is where he has stayed and where he has done his best known personal work. His 2015 series Without Water, macro studies of his florist wife's dying flowers rescued from her studio, became his first solo exhibition and, to his genuine surprise, sold out editions and travelled the world. He'd hated the genre at uni. Now his prints hang in Denmark, England, Korea, Norway and Vietnam.
There is grief threaded through these years too. In late 2017, with his father gravely ill, Isamu had to decide whether to fly to Sydney to open his second solo show. His family told him to go, because it was what Peter would have wanted. He dedicated the opening to his father. Two days later Peter Sawa died, on Isamu's birthday. The man who told him there was no money in photography, and then handed him the camera anyway.
Full circle
For about twenty five years, Isamu lost contact with Tommy Emmanuel. Then in 2024, knowing Emmanuel was coming back to Australia to tour after the long Covid hiatus, he tracked down an email address and wrote, fully expecting to be forgotten. The phone rang at three in the morning. It was Emmanuel, and he remembered everything. They picked back up as mates, and Isamu featured him in a personal documentary project about people who live with a sense of purpose.
The following year, through that reconnection, Isamu met Mark Bisits, the marketing manager at Maton Guitars, who invited him out to tour the factory. Maton is the company Bill May founded in 1946, naming it from "May" and "Tone," still family owned and run today by May's daughter and son in law, Linda and Neville Kitchen. It is the firm that pioneered the use of native Australian timbers like Queensland Maple, Blackwood and Bunya when the rest of the guitar world leaned on spruce and rosewood, and the firm that built the instruments behind Tommy Emmanuel, Keith Urban, George Harrison and a long line of others.
Isamu walked through the door and found seventy people hand building world class guitars. After watching Holden's manufacturing die, there was something that landed hard about an Australian company still making something this good with its hands. He wanted to do something with them. His first instinct, naturally, was a documentary of the factory floor, the dust and the smell and the people. Then he found the book Maton had already produced for its seventieth anniversary, shot by a photographer he knew well, and realised the obvious picture had already been taken.
So he went home and thought, and asked to come back for a second tour to reset his head. The idea that arrived came from a single thing he'd seen on the floor: the way Maton bookmatches its soundboard timber, splitting one piece and opening it so two halves mirror each other. Two pieces coming together. What if he set a before and an after side by side, the raw billet against the finished instrument, as a diptych. He pitched the wacky idea to Maton with no expectations attached, and they gave him the run of the place to experiment.
The making was patient and almost monastic. Isamu asked to take the components back to his own Collingwood studio rather than work at the factory, and Maton let him cart out everything from finished guitars to billets to the jigs they build on. He spent seven continuous days shooting alone. The setup was deliberately simple, a sheet of glass raised over black velvet, the camera looking straight down, everything lit by a single diffused light cut down to where it needed to go. He shot on a hundred megapixel Phase One medium format system from Denmark, the gear he's used for over a decade, and moved off his usual long lens to an 80mm so he had to get closer and more intimate with each instrument. In post he married one half of each frame to the other, the finished side to the raw side, lining them up in Capture One through a live overlay.
People keep telling him how three dimensional the prints look. He's had to reverse engineer why, because he did it on instinct. One light, the best camera he can get his hands on, careful printing, and a sheet of glass over the finished frame. That's the trick, as far as he can tell.
What turned a personal experiment into an exhibition was a moment in the Maton foyer. Isamu showed Linda Kitchen some of the images on his iPad and she said her father would have loved them. Bill May, the founder. That was enough to tell him there was more in the work than a social media post. He found out 2026 marked Maton's eightieth anniversary and that no event had been locked in yet, and proposed a joint show. The result is Virtuosity, his fourth solo exhibition, which opened in Collingwood in May 2026, with each guitar's journey from timber to instrument hung as a paired diptych. Central to it is the story of the Maton Master Built T.E. Personal, the guitar built in collaboration with Emmanuel himself.
Emmanuel wrote the foreword. He couldn't make opening night but came through a few days early to preview the show, and for Isamu that was the whole arc snapping shut. The guitar hero from when he was nineteen walked through the door, and Isamu felt nineteen again, except this time the hero had come to see what he had made. Emmanuel brought his young daughter; Isamu's eleven year old was there too. At the premiere, with no live music planned, Diesel and Mark offered to play, and the room filled with people who had no idea it was coming, energy running off the walls until late.
Nobody dreamed this into being, which is exactly why it worked. Isamu went in with no end goal and put everything into the idea, and something with wide appeal fell out the other side. If there's a dream left in it now, it's that the show travels. Maton's tagline is that they build guitars handmade for the world stage. Isamu reckons his pictures of them are ready for the same stage. For a kid who shot a duck on a pond and a man told there was no money in any of it, that is a reasonable place to want to end up.
