Daisuke
Yokota
(Born in Saitama,Japan,1983) is part of a leading young generation of
Japanese photographers. His images in predominantly black and white
- sometimes with a subtle hint of colour - show a
haunting, indefinable world with shadowy, anonymous apparitions and
nondescript places, contrasted with sublime, colourful
representations of skies and clouds which evoke feelings of
timelessness.
With
his strongly contrasted black-and-white photography, Yokota seems to,
at first glance, be working in the Japanese photography tradition.
However a close examination of his work reveals an individual
approach in which the elements of process and intervention play an
important role. He uses a combination of digital photography and
traditional film to shoot and re-shoot images, which he then
manipulates further using other techniques such as photocopying and
Photoshop. He has set up an improvised darkroom in his apartment
where he can freely experiment with analogue techniques and chemical
processes, where chance is also allowed to leave its traces on the
final image. Yokota adds layer upon layer to his work, with each
layer offering new potential for the next image, leading to
alienated, mysterious and poetic representations of a different sort
of world.
The
works - whose endless repetitions take them further and further away
from the original image - are partly inspired by electronic musicians
such as Aphex Twin. He takes the same ideas of echo, delay and
reverberation that influence the sense of time in their music and
applies them to his own visual work. Yokota feels that the lack of a
sense of duration and perception of time is a weak point in
photography, so he experiments with other ways of evoking the aspect
of time in his work. For example by creating images that refer to
memories, dreams, or mindscapes that enable the viewer to make a
mental journey through time.
