Daisuke Yokota

Daisuke Yokota was born in Saitama in 1983. He graduated from Nippon Photography Institute and received the Canon New Cosmos of Photography Excellence Award in 2008 and the 2nd 1_WALL Photography Grand Prix in 2010. He won the Foam Paul Huf Award in 2016 and the 45th Kimura Ihei Award in 2019. Major projects and publications include Back Yard, Site, Site / Cloud, VERTIGO, Tarachine, Matter, MATTER / BURN OUT, Matter / Vomit, and Photographs.^*1

Yokota’s themes include the materiality of photography, memory, time, deterioration, repetition, chemical chance, the boundary between image and object, and the flood of images in contemporary information society. He repeatedly photographs, scans, prints, rephotographs, damages, develops, burns, waxes, folds, and reprints images. His methods range from hot-water development, direct development of unexposed film, darkroom experimentation, digital manipulation, camera-less abstraction, installation-scale paper rolls, and photobook sequencing.^*2 His interest in failed or damaged film led toward Matter, while attention to copying and handmade tactility was shaped through zine production, as he explains in a Canon interview. The Metropolitan Museum of Art describes his practice as performative and camera-less, connecting it to Man Ray and Moholy-Nagy.^*5 Emerging in the 2010s, when digital circulation, zine culture, and photobook festivals opened new routes for Japanese photographers beyond older magazine and gallery systems, Yokota’s work matters because it insists on the stubborn materiality of photographic objects in an era that often treats images as frictionless data.^*2

Foam described Matter, when selecting Yokota for the Paul Huf Award, as a room-filling installation in which each space produced a different experience of photography. Critic Kotaro Iizawa’s review of MATTER / argued that Yokota’s work differs from lightweight post-digital image manipulation because it is intensely concerned with the bodily and material limits of photographic images. The repeated damage and reuse of images do not produce abstraction alone; they ask whether memory, time, and photographic evidence can survive excessive copying, degradation, and reprocessing.^*4