Daisuke Yokota

nocturnes particularly - and site/cloud
his figures and 'landscapes' look like aliens exploring an alien landscape, or an city on another world. some images look like neg\tives, some are positive, i think often they are shot at night. it all gives this other-worldly feel, and the textures really help with that. they remind my of picture i have seen from the first space apollo moon mission, they just have this texture and tone. the dirty scratched textures/surfaces, make them feel like they were shot in some other world, like shot by a spy, that has then smuggled them back to earth.

i think actually underneath all the textures the pictures are of quite banal things and scenes, a lot seems to be basic street shots, when you look under the textures. so what is he saying? is he trying to create something new and exciting out of something quite banal and dull? in site/cloud. maybe he is just taking pictures of the things around him, like he is stuck in this place and wants to break out, he wants to break his pictures to make them into something new

overll i quite like his website, i dont mind that you have to click through the images to get to the next one, but i think perhaps he has uploaded fairly large files, so each time i click for the next picture it takes a few moments for it to fully appear on the screen, maybe my wifi is just being a bit slow, but it hasnt had this problem otherwise, i think if he had slightly smaller files it would load nice and quickly and i could flick through them quicker, like i didnt have to pause in my looking at the photos and my thinking, if i didnt have to wait a couple of seconds each time after i click

his series never have any writing or explanation to give the viewer any context, they have a name but nothing else, this suits his work i think beause they are all quite strange images its good for us the viewers to make us think.

in backyard his images are not, i think, all shot actually in his backyard, but the name gives us thought to what the series is about, the name and the nightime shots counjures up imaginations of teenagers kicked out the house together using the night and the empty streets as their backyard, their playground.

his series fossil, seems like a refernce to hiroshi sugimotos fossils. the images are out of focus pictures, often of naked humans, printed to paper, then scrunched up and folded out again. its like the humans are just slight traces on the paper, again they sort of look like aliens, strange glowing blobs, maybe its a refernce to how aliens are shown in films and tv, the papers are scrunched up to accentuate the throwing away of the paper, a refernce to photography looking back, like the humans are lost in time, the pictures of them thrown aay, then he has found this old battered archive of images of humans in their natural form to present us to us, because the humans are quite primeval in their appearance, naked, like they are the first humans living among the Neanderthals,

some of his pictures appear in more than one of his projects, very strange

http://daisukeyokota.net/


Quote from http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2015/may/22/daisuke-yokota-acid-loving-japanese-photographer

His process is meticulous to the point of obsessive. He shoots on a compact digital camera, prints and rephotographs the results on medium-format film, then prints them again several times using heat and light to mark or distort the images.
it sounds so interesting, i would love to see the process from start to finish

An early series from 2012, Back Yard, was shot in the backyard of Yokota’s home-cum-studio in Tokyo, but looks otherworldly, like much of his work. Ghostly, ethereal figures stand in a blurred grey landscape, or seem to have auras around their heads.
well shit, i am surprised, the photogrpahs, all of them together suggested a larger area than what i image as a backyard, maybe he just managed to photograph from so many different angles and set up new spaces that it all seems new, or maybe he just has a huge backyard!

Then, to speak about his music, there’s a lot of experimentation with delay, reverb and echo, which is playing with the way you perceive time. Of course, there’s no time in a photograph, but I thought about how to apply this kind of effect, or filter, to photography.”

theres no time in a photograph. ima have to think abuot that one for a while... because there is the time when you look at a photograph, as in how long you are looking at it for, but the photography itself remains static, where it is, if it is on a wall or a table or wherever, when you stop looking it is still there on the wall. 

there is no time in a photograph. it shows a completely still moment, a quick snapshot, a thin slice of time. what if the shutter is open for minutes or hours or days? is there still no time in the photograph? maybe he is referring to the raw materials, it is not time it is paper with ink on it, or paper with silver particles on

Yokota stands out, too, because his results tend transcend the sum of the parts. Or, to put it more brutally, his creative process does not (as with so many emerging young artists) appear more interesting than the results. The idea, execution and final work are all of an equal and often mysterious intensity. If his current work is a guide, his journey into photography and beyond will be interesting.

i need to find this for myself, my process does appear to be interesting to people, but if i cant follow it up with images more interesting, then its nothing

quotes from http://www.americanphotomag.com/shoot-print-repeat-interview-daisuke-yokota

At first I used a compact digital camera, and printed the image out. Then I photographed that image with a 6x7 film camera, using color film, even though the image is later black and white. I developed it at home, in a way so that imperfections or noise will appear—I make the water extra warm, or don’t agitate the film. Even before that, I let some light hit the film; I’m developing in my bathroom, so it’s not even a real darkroom, which helps, but I’ll hold a lighter up to the film, or whatever is around. I’m always experimenting—the goal is to not do it the same way twice. So then, to produce more and more variations in the final image, I re-photographed the image about ten times.

woah there if he is developing colour film in his bathroom, does that mean i can do it? he also sounds like me when im cooking a meal from scratch, i try to add ingredients in different orders and cook for different legnths of time, and add different herbs and chop things smaller or larger... i need to do more in photogrpahy

You mean, you developed and printed and re-shot each image ten times?

Yeah, more or less. There’s no set number, but about that much. It’s not so much about realizing an image I had in my head from before, but finding something in the process. “Back Yard” was pretty simple, just that. 

finding something in the process? this is all about me, but his aproach is more spontaneous, he seems not really to have a clear idea at all, where i have some sort of idea, i just get too lost, he just embraces that lost-ness, and lets his creativity flow, whereas i get stressed of having to explain what i am doing and why and then i do get properly lost and that stresses me further, and its just a neverending circle of feeling lost leading to stress to lost-ness leading to stress...

If you look at music or film, there is time there. In other words, the work has a clear beginning and end, and in between, you shut out your daily life—you throw yourself into the work. There’s no element of duration to your experience of a photograph; it’s closer to an object. I felt that this was an extremely weak point of photography. So, I’m aware that photography can’t function in the same way as films or music, but I wonder whether it isn’t possible to create a way for photographs to carry time within them. When you’re going to sleep, you think about the stuff that happened to you that day, right? You might see some images, but they’re completely distant from what really happened—they’re hazy. You’re trying to recall something, and photography can also recall things in this way. Of course my photographs do function as some sort of record, but there’s no agreement between the photograph and my own recollection of what happened. The impression is completely different. I think using these effects of delay, reverb, and echo (in photographic terms, developing the film "badly" and so on) might be a way to alter the sensation of time in a visual way.

this guy has so got it, he understands his work, his process, and the point of photography so well, yet he's still searching to say something of photography, he has found a point and interesting point, born from his influences that has helped him to make great work.