Ilan Derech (Mexican, b. 1988) is a street and documentary photographer whose practice expanded into AI-assisted image-making after years spent living in Tokyo.,He studied art and design before turning to photography, developing a cinematic style built on candid scenes of everyday urban life.,He lives and works in Tokyo, Japan.,
Derech turned to photography after the death of his father, when a friend gave him a camera during a period of depression. He found that vintage lenses suited the photographs he wanted to make, and eventually sold his equipment to fund his first trip to Japan, traveling with a single camera and lens. He arrived in Tokyo as the city was shutting down because of Covid, and continued photographing what he called the beauty in everyday life. He travels extensively with his camera and lives in Tokyo with his wife.
After several years living in Japan, Derech felt his sense of what mattered in art shift, and began exploring the idea of wabi-sabi, the beauty found in things that are worn, fragile, or incomplete. For “Wabi-Sabi Syntax”, an online exhibition shown through Fellowship in July 2025, he fed his own photographs into AI models and found they generated images resembling traditional Japanese woodblock prints, or ukiyo-e, with visible errors. He treated these AI mistakes as a new visual grammar that reflected his own experience of living between Mexican and Japanese culture.
He has served as a global ambassador for ZEISS Camera Lenses. His photographs have also been exhibited at the Soumaya Museum in Mexico City and shown at Hacker House events in New York, Tel Aviv, Lisbon and Stockholm.In 2025 his work was included in Collecting Art Onchain, a book documenting a decade of blockchain-based digital art history.
