Daisuke Yokota

Why Yokota Chose Photography: The Darkroom Before the Subject

Yokota’s route into photography began with cameras and the darkroom, before he had found a subject he wanted to photograph. The memory of his father’s SLR as a special object led him to the Nippon Photography Institute, where he learned darkroom processing. He has connected the chemical transformations he encountered there to his childhood experience in a chemistry club^*1. After graduating, he built a darkroom in his family home. For Yokota, photography first meant working directly on light, chemicals, film, and paper; selecting the external world through the camera came later.

The Crisis of Having No Subject and They: Making Photographs After Exposure

As Yokota tried to establish himself as a photographer, he confronted the question of what he could continue photographing. Unable to find a subject he could follow over time, he worried that “if photography cannot exist without a subject, then I cannot make photographs”^*2. His snapshots included unintended figures and signs, leaving him uncertain about what he had actually chosen at the moment of exposure. To identify the elements to which he had responded, he erased faces and words in Photoshop, rephotographed the images on film, and developed them aggressively. They became an answer to his predicament: existing images could serve as material for continued work even without a stable subject^*1.

Where Darkroom Work Met Sampling: Extending the Process into the Zine

Darkroom work and music production gave Yokota a way through this crisis. He had sampled cable hum and other noises, building music through the repetition of fragments. That experience of sampling led him to process existing photographs in search of another image^*1. In photocopied booklets, scratches from the copier, variations in density, and show-through from the reverse side also generated new decisions. In Back Yard and Site, shooting, editing, copying, and page order formed a continuous process; each result guided the next treatment and sequence^*5. The zine became part of the process through which photographs were repeated and altered.

Photography and Memory: Remaking the Past from the Present

Discussing Back Yard, Yokota has said that repeatedly recalling the same experience never produces the same memory twice; memory changes in relation to the present^*6. A photograph fixes a scene, while recollection produces different meanings from each new vantage point. David Bate describes photography as a “device of recall” that produces memory within culture^*24. Annette Kuhn argues that “memory work” with personal and family photographs reveals how the past is narrated anew from the present^*25.

Yokota’s rephotography makes this reconstruction occur within the image as well as in the viewer’s account. Street photographs such as Untitled No. 421 (2012) developed into Site / Cloud^*18. Yokota passes existing images through digital processing, printing, rephotography, high-temperature development, and scanning, transforming them while retaining traces of their earlier states^*1. The photograph no longer remains a finished object fixed at the moment of exposure; it becomes material through which the present repeatedly acts on the past.

Why Rephotography and Chemicals Were Necessary

When an indistinct image is designed entirely through digital processing, its range of change tends to remain within operations selected in advance by the artist. Yokota has described a cycle in which he allows more chance into the shooting process, brings the image closer to an ideal during editing, and then introduces unforeseen changes again through development^*5. He has also said that results that thwart expectation and detach the photographed subject from both its surroundings and himself provide clues for the next stage of work^*22. Chemicals, heat, and peeling emulsion introduce changes that the artist cannot fully determine in advance. Yokota’s authorship emerges in his response to what occurs: he selects which images to retain and which to process again.

For Mortuary, Yokota developed enormous sheets of photographic paper with limited equipment, accepting scratches and uneven development as conditions of production^*10. Ceidra Moon Murphy reads the disintegrating photographs of Yokota and Stephen Gill as works concerned with the process of recollection more than with the contents of memory, treating the decomposition of the image as a form of production that cannot be explained solely as loss^*23. Caitlin DeSilvey’s study of cases in which decay and disassembly also generate meaning provides a related point of reference^*28. Damage is not a decorative effect that makes an image resemble memory. It is the process through which an earlier image changes through contact with the body, apparatus, and materials of the present.

Inversion: Leaving the Subject to Examine How Photographs Arise

As Yokota continued rephotography and hot-water development, his attention shifted to the imaging apparatus itself. He came to believe that compact-camera design, exposure controls, and image processing define the range of what counts as a photographic image, and that his own snapshots could not escape those limits^*20. In Inversion and Color Photographs, he developed unexposed film at high temperatures, producing images through peeling emulsion and the flow of chemicals^*2. The Getty catalogs Inversion as a 2015 gelatin silver print with solarization^*8. Yokota has explained that the everyday use of digital photography reduced the need to treat film as an efficient recording medium, allowing him to approach it as a chemical material^*2.

Back Yard, Site, and VERTIGO: The Photobook as a Structure of Repetition

Yokota’s photobooks translate repeated processing into the time of turning pages. In Back Yard and Site, the dense blacks of photocopying, thin paper, and show-through connect images as figures and streets recur in altered states^*5. Bibliographic information and page images for Site are available through shashasha^*14. In VERTIGO, recurring bodies, darkness, and reflections call earlier photographs back into view as the sequence unfolds^*22. The Seattle Art Museum likewise presents Immerse and Linger as works in which book design forms part of the artwork^*12.

Inversion and Color Photographs: Abstract Photography and the Viewer’s Projection

In Inversion and Color Photographs, references to specific events recede, bringing the surfaces of developed film and photographic paper forward. In a Kominek Gallery exhibition text, Brad Feuerhelm places Yokota’s color chemigrams within a history of abstract photography based on chemical reaction, reading them as works that loosen the artist’s control over representation and open space for the viewer’s projection^*17. Each page of the photobook INVERSION was screenprinted, leaving variations from copy to copy^*15. Yokota has said that photographic material becomes a “phenomenon” when someone encounters it at a particular time and place^*30. As reference weakens, the viewer’s role in finding forms within the emulsion becomes more apparent.

MATTER / BURN OUT and Matter / Vomit: The Weight and Waste of Image Overproduction

For MATTER / BURN OUT, Yokota burned a group of photographs previously exhibited in Xiamen, photographed the combustion in roughly 4,000 frames, and carried those images into a new work and photobook^*9. The earlier installation disappeared, but its destruction returned to the present work as new photographs. Yokota neither preserved the previous work intact nor discarded it completely; the state of burning became material for the next image. In Matter / Vomit, he bound approximately 100,000 prints with wax and exhibited them as a mass that covered the floor^*16. Images that circulate lightly as reproducible data became 100,000 sheets of paper, wax, occupied exhibition space, and post-combustion debris. The volume of images and the burden of preserving or discarding them became perceptible within the same space.

Room. Pt. 1 and Sediment: How Supports Alter Black, Transparency, and Viewing Distance

In Room. Pt. 1, the same images made in a love hotel appear on light-emitting monitors, light-reflecting photographic paper, transparent OPP sheets and PVC, and wall-mounted panels^*4. Because one output serves as the negative for the next work, the depth of black, the degree of transparency, the relation between front and back, and the viewer’s distance all change even when the same data is used. Comparing the supports shows that an image is not identical information independent of its medium. It looks different under the conditions of emission, reflection, and transmission^*20. In Sediment, multiple images and supports overlap like geological strata, making visible a history in which each output becomes a different photographic object, while the reconstruction of the original location recedes.

Plants, Tama River Midstream Area and Plants, Darkroom: Observation and Darkroom-Generated Images

In recent years, Yokota has described the plants of the middle reaches of the Tama River as “the first subject I have wanted to pursue”^*2. In Plants, Tama River Midstream Area, he observes the forms of wild plants with a large-format camera; in Plants, Darkroom, he returns to the same region through images produced with his distinctive darkroom methods^*3. This development also shows that memory cannot account for Yokota’s entire body of work. Even after finding a subject, the question remains: how closely should he observe forms in the external world, and how far should he accept forms that arise in the darkroom?

Zines and International Circulation: Post-Digital Photography in the 2010s

Yokota sent Back Yard and Site abroad, gaining recognition through photobook circulation before receiving broad institutional recognition in Japan^*2. He has acknowledged that his black-and-white Xerox booklets acquired value overseas through their association with “Japanese photography”^*5. Recognition followed through the Outset | Unseen Exhibition Fund in 2013, the John Kobal New Work Award in 2015, and the Foam Paul Huf Award in 2016^*7. His works move among Photoshop, printers, scanners, photocopiers, rephotography, and emulsion. The central issue is the process of returning images altered by different apparatuses to the next stage of production, beyond a simple division between digital and analog.

Photographic Materiality: Bringing the Photograph’s Later History into Production

Elizabeth Edwards and Janice Hart describe photographs as both images and objects, arguing that physical properties, modes of handling, and cultural settings help shape their meanings^*27. Ordinarily, scratches, fading, and traces of movement accumulate after a photograph has been made. Yokota produces stains, folds, peeling, wax, and burn marks during production, then rephotographs those states for use in subsequent images. Photographic materiality appears here as a mechanism through which present handling changes both the form and the interpretation of an earlier image, not simply as a surface effect.

José van Dijck argues that the manipulability of digital photography accommodates the continual remaking of personal images, while making it difficult to control how those images will be reused or placed in new settings in the future^*26. Yokota extends this plasticity beyond the digital file, passing images among film, chemicals, paper, copies, and installation materials. What matters is how each present treatment changes the status of an earlier photograph—as record, material, copy, or remnant.

A History of Abstract Photography: A Process That Does Not End in a Single Finished Image

Cameraless photography and darkroom manipulation have histories extending throughout the twentieth century. The inclusion of Inversion in Tate Modern’s Shape of Light indicates Yokota’s reception within the history of abstract photography^*19. His position becomes clearer when abstraction and damage are seen as stages in an ongoing chain—digital images, rephotographed negatives, emulsion, copies, photobooks, installation materials, and records of burning—rather than effects resolved in a single finished image. Each earlier output can become material through which present production makes contact with a photograph of the past again, instead of remaining fixed as either a failed image or a final work.

Studies of photography and memory have also applied Bergson’s ideas of duration, perception, and memory to photography and film, considering the relation between the isolated instant and time as lived continuity^*29. This does not establish a direct influence on Yokota. It provides a broader intellectual context for considering the photograph as more than a fixed instant, and for understanding how earlier states persist within the present. The direct basis for interpreting Yokota remains his own statements and his repeated production processes.

A Contrast with Max Pinckers: Constructing Representation and Remaking Records

The 2016 Foto-Forum exhibition Floating Worlds paired Yokota’s Linger with Max Pinckers’s Two Kinds of Memory and Memory Itself^*11. Pinckers approaches documentary as a “speculative process” that exceeds the reproduction of external reality, studying the structures surrounding its production and consumption^*13. Colin Pantall distinguishes Pinckers’s questioning of representational frameworks from Yokota’s layering of present-day processes onto earlier images^*21. Yokota’s work centers on returning the already photographed image itself to present conditions; the reenactment of a past narrative is not his primary concern.