When Kentaro Yamada lost his full-time job in 2012, he felt pretty defeated.
"[I felt] that society didn't need me, and it would move along just fine without me," he told Business Insider.
However, Yamada is an eternal optimist, and he decided to turn the downtime into something productive.
"I decided to make sure one positive thing happened in the midst of that uncertainty, and that was to learn photography seriously," he said.
Greatly inspired by Brandon Stanton, the photographer behind Humans of New York, Yamada knew that he wanted to document people. He decided to add his own magical take: including levitating objects in the shot.
Photographing both his subjects and their prized posessions, Yamada has now documented a handful of Chicago's own successful entrepreneurs for a project he calls "The Uplifted".
As for his process creating a final, finished image, he said, "I usually capture a subject and objects separately and combine the two later in Photoshop."
Ahead, 13 Chicagoans and their stories, as told by Yamada.
April Carlisle oversees shopper and customer marking initiatives as a senior vice president at Leo Burnett. This mother of two once competed in the National Jigsaw Puzzle Championships years ago. Yamada had her pose with her prized jigsaw puzzle globe.
Bluford Putnam is the chief economist of the CME Group, browsing through weather reports, unemployment numbers, and currency trends around the world to formulate economic outlooks. Here, he proudly levitates his first published book, "The Monetary Approach to International Adjustment", which he wrote in 1982.
Bruce Daugherty is a senior vice president at one of Chicago's most successful pizzerias, Connie's Pizza. This busy grandfather of four multitasks daily, looking after the supplies at storefronts nationwide.
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