Interview with Yoshiyuki Okuyama. His new series "photographs" depicts a family melted in the light and his own memories superimposed on them.

Looking at a photo. It has been a long time since the object at the end of our gaze was not a print on paper, but a screen on a smartphone. That is why it is refreshing to see photographer Yoshiyuki Okuyama choose the “family album” as the theme for his new work "photographs.

The exhibition venue is Taka Ishii Gallery Photography / Film in Roppongi. This work, presented together with the photo book of the same name, will be exhibited at the "Taka Ishii Gallery Photography / Film" in Roppongi, Tokyo.FLOWERS"., 2023.windows"It is also the conclusion of a trilogy following

The trigger for this project was the discovery of over 100 family photo albums in the house where his grandparents and father used to live and where Okuyama now has his own studio.

It was when I was making “windows” that I decided to make a trilogy. I thought I could use the theme of "the passing of gazes. In "flowers," I photographed flowers placed by the window of my studio, and the viewer's gaze was from the inside to the outside. On the other hand, "windows," in which I photographed the frosted glass windows of private houses all over Tokyo, is from the outside looking in. I was interested in the fact that the works were created in the same city of Tokyo, but the gazes are the exact opposite.
Then I was looking at a family album I found in my studio, and I realized that this time I was looking at the photos from “top to bottom. I think the trilogy is made possible by these three points of view and the fact that all the works were created in the atelier.

In contrast to today's photographs, which tend to be shared, photographs in family albums were once intended first and foremost to be preserved. Mr. Okuyama became aware of such a way of photography, and began to duplicate each of the albums in which his own ancestors were recorded.

However, in the finished work, the person in the photograph is covered by light and loses his or her human outline. The memorial photograph of the Okuyama family has been transformed into nothingness. Beyond the abstraction of the image, there is what Mr. Okuyama wants to express through "photographs.

As I looked back over the album, I realized that the fact that I am alive today is based on the accumulation of all the choices made by the previous generation. If someone's choice had been one different, it might all have been different. I felt the preciousness of that, and at the same time, I felt it was a kind of pressure. So I wanted to express the sense of respect and gratitude for being part of a family, while at the same time expressing the feeling of being liberated as an individual.
The person in the picture, which was originally a concrete object, is abstracted by the light and becomes “someone who is no one. I hope that when you look back at them, you will feel a sense of liberation, and I also hope that the viewer will be able to see themselves in them.

Photographs" collection of photographs
Left: Normal edition ¥7,700, ,Right: Special limited edition ¥16,500

Concrete and abstract. Reality and unreality. Bacon and ice cream. The sense of simultaneous presence of opposites has always been a common thread in Okuyama's work.

I am not interested in depicting what I see in reality as it is. In this work, the original photograph captured what was in reality, but the luminous object created by the photocopying process was not physically there. By mixing things that were not originally there, it is possible to bring to light things that were not visible in their original state. I feel that such contradictions and the sense of confronting the world as a polyhedron are at the root of my expression.

I am also interested in consciously reconstructing what was created unconsciously. Many old family photo albums have photos roughly pasted on the base paper, and are not really neatly organized. In order to bring that down, this time I dared to do things that I would never normally do, such as slightly shifting the placement of consecutive photos or slightly not aligning the edges. I even asked Kaoru Kasai, who did the binding for the book, if I had made a mistake. (Laughs). (Laughs.) But the fact that I spend so much time working on “not over-arranging” may be a sense that is uniquely my own.

While photography is a medium that records concrete reality, it also makes us think about what is not captured. Such paradoxical beauty is found in “photographs. The exhibition will be held until Saturday, June 13.