Born in Los Angeles, California, photographer and creative director Yudo Kurita‘s images are always one of a kind — a creative hotpot of surrealistic beauty and encompassing abstraction  — balancing art, culture, fashion and narrative thread of nature.

Growing up moving around Washington state, and spending his late teen years in Capitol Hill in Seattle — skateboarding was at the heart of it all. The city paired with the two strong women in his life — his mom who came up in the New York avant-garde punk and art scene and his MMA-fighting med-school sister — had an inevitable impact on him. “Seattle in general showed me the importance of sticking to what you love regardless of the results or what the outside world thinks of you.”

Now residing in Los Angeles, he works as a creative director and photographer: “LA really is a microcosm of the world itself.” Find his clients including Nike, Arc’teryx Veilance, Braindead to Carhartt —  to founding his own studio Relatable Content, or creating editorials for his own magazine COMFORT co-founded with collaborator Robert LeBlanc in 2021 — Kurita shoots on either a Nikon D800 or Fuji GA645, yet it’s the process and visual storytelling of creating images that is most compelling for him. Through an unconventional background — including an initial stint studying architecture and an offer from Parsons to study photography, to professionally snowboarding for Salmon Snowboards, to work with brand-builders Nin Truong and Christa Thomas of WKND back in Seattle, it was through an opportunity to assist his good friend and photographer Ian Morrison [at the time, in exchange for rent] that brought him back to Los Angeles and begin a career in image-making embedded with unlimited creative freedom. Find it including photography and creative direction, and extending to painting, collages and publishing. He adds, “I just learned that with new optical neural projecting they can already project images of your dreams directly from your head in the lab. That’s probably how I will be making “photos” in the near future.”

Late last year, Kurita started his own print publication: COMFORT. Through his background of making zines and coordinating gallery shows, his unconstrained approach to creativity is now encapsulated in the magazine co-founded with friend and co-collaborator Robert LeBlanc. The bi-annual magazine is a visual amalgamation of creativity, community, and radical design — also extending to physical space, product and community based projects. He notes, “Comfort is a space for me to not worry about brands or other publications for my personal work and a space for other people to have that same freedom.” 

And so, what’s next?
“A never-ending list of things. But for now I’m just happy to be here.”

Get to know more on Yudo Kurita also on:
Champ City Portrait Series – Los Angeles

Text: Joanna Kawecki
All images: Yudo Kurita