Takashi Yasumura

Studying Photography and Finding a Stimulus in New Cosmos of Photography

Born in Shiga Prefecture in 1972, Yasumura studied photography at Nihon University College of Art and graduated in 1995. New Cosmos of Photography began in 1991, during his second year, and he repeatedly visited its exhibitions at P3 in Yotsuya. He has recalled being strongly affected by seeing award recipients create places for their work through both images and words, as well as by reading statements of intent in magazines^*1.

He found it difficult to identify with the prominent photography of “my life, my everyday world” and began looking for something that only photography could do^*1. His parents’ home offered a familiar space in which the lens repeatedly altered relations of size, distance, material, and use. His concern turned toward the conditions under which a three-dimensional living space becomes a flat image and everydayness begins to lose its stability.

Everyday Photography in the 1990s and Yasumura’s Different Direction

In 1990s Japan, photographs of friends, romance, the body, and the photographer’s immediate surroundings gained broad attention through compact cameras and magazine culture. New Cosmos of Photography was one of the forums where these varied approaches appeared. The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum later included Yasumura with Masafumi Sanai, Takashi Homma, Kyoji Takahashi, Hanayo, and others in an exhibition on photography and society during the Heisei era^*22. Yasumura also used the private space of his family home, but focused on the way its apparent everydayness disappeared in a photograph. In his statement for the 1999 award, he wrote that conventions within a family can look strange to an outsider and that photography brings the doubtful nature of the everyday into awareness^*21. The series was published as Domestic Scandals^*20. The 4×5 camera, tripod, extensive depth of field, and limited rearrangement allowed him to examine visual conditions one at a time.

Domestic Scandals—The Family Home as an Already Staged Set

Domestic Scandals was photographed with a 4×5 camera over seven years in his parents’ middle-class home. A Yossi Milo exhibition text describes traditional decoration, plastic and mass-produced goods, and Westernized household objects occupying the same rooms^*19. Yasumura selected staplers, cassette players, snacks, slippers, walls, and floors and adjusted their color and form within the frame. The house appears as a setting where postwar Japanese domestic normality is assembled from commodities, habits, and imitative materials. The official work page presents the series as a continuous group of images^*16. IBASHO’s publication entry records a book in which the photographs are accompanied by three essays treating the home as a stage of representation^*3.

Finding Deliberate Awkwardness Through Minimal Arrangement

In an IMA interview, Yasumura contrasted the apparent naturalness of his early series Namanurui Kaze ga Fuku with the deliberate “awkwardness” he intensified in Domestic Scandals^*2. He moves furniture and household objects and adjusts focus and light while leaving most of the room intact. The resulting strangeness remains tied to products chosen by the family, habits of display and cleanliness, and seasonal routines. Visible intervention weakens a simple division between natural life and artificial photography. Existing staging and photographic adjustment can be compared within the same frame.

Holding the Entire Frame in Focus and Destabilizing Depth

The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum’s Japanese Oranges holds the entire frame in focus, making depth and object scale difficult to determine. Tokyo Museum Collection describes household objects as appearing model-like and domestic space as revealing its fictive quality^*4. Ordinary vision changes attention and focus with distance. A large-format camera and small aperture hold foreground and background with comparable intensity, and the camera’s descriptive capacity unsettles the apparent naturalness of space.

Why Use Real Rooms Instead of Models?

Yasumura’s photographs can resemble images of miniatures or elaborate sets, although most use actual rooms and objects. IBASHO Gallery presents Domestic Scandals and Nature Tracing as connected investigations of the artificiality of everyday life and the reproduction of nature^*5.

A model would make unstable scale the result of a device designed entirely by the artist. Yasumura retains the actual objects and limits intervention to arrangement, camera position, focus, and light. The disturbance therefore returns to commodities, architecture, and household habits. The viewer is led to reconsider which cues of depth, size, use, and material made the space recognizable as everyday.

Japanese Oranges—The Scale of Fruit, Garden, and Model

In Japanese Oranges, citrus fruit, leaves, branches, and background share the same density, making it difficult to decide immediately whether the scene is a potted plant, a garden tree, or a model^*4. The title identifies the subject while the photograph destabilizes its size and setting. The color of the fruit anchors the frame, yet the image presents nature as something cultivated, arranged, and observed within domestic life.

1/1—Public-Building Surfaces and the One-to-One Relation of Object and Image

1/1 was made over roughly eight years beginning in 2008 at regional public facilities and harbors, where Yasumura photographed walls, floors, equipment, and decoration with a 4×5 camera. In an IMA interview, he explained that he reduced the “background” inevitably recorded by the camera and made visual depth shallow through composition^*2.

The title refers to a one-to-one relation between object and image and to the camera that mediates between them. MISAKO & ROSEN interprets the slash as the camera and explains how, after being photographed, an object gains a different autonomy as a plane of color or flat surface^*6. With less information about a site’s function, public architecture approaches abstraction while retaining scratches and material traces. Antenne Books records the publication as containing 111 photographs made between 2008 and 2015^*7.

Nature Tracing—Imitations of Nature Brought into the Home

Nature Tracing addresses artificial flowers, synthetic turf, printed plants, and arranged gardens—objects and actions through which everyday life imitates nature. The official site publishes the photographs and gathers imitated nature in domestic and public space as one series^*17. The work observes how nature is reduced in scale, maintained, commodified, and brought indoors. As with the mass-produced objects in Domestic Scandals, naturalness is produced through material, arrangement, and repetition.

The Photobook Domestic Scandals and Comparison Across Pages

According to the official bibliography, Domestic Scandals was published by Osiris in 2005 with thirty-six color photographs and essays by Martin Jaeggi, Akihito Yasumi, and Shinobu Kuraishi^*18. 1/1 contains 111 images across 132 pages, a comparison by Minoru Shimizu with Alfred Stieglitz’s Equivalents, and a text by Yasumura^*18. Repetition in book form allows mass-produced domestic goods and public-building surfaces to be compared as visual habits within the same society. Format and sequence establish a common viewing distance across distinct spaces.

The Slowness of the 4×5 Camera and Minimal Intervention

The official site and biography show Yasumura’s sustained attention to homes, objects, and landscapes through precise color photography^*8. MISAKO & ROSEN documents the continuity of his solo exhibitions and series^*13, while IBASHO Gallery brings together images and collection information from Domestic Scandals through Nature Tracing^*14. Yossi Milo records that Domestic Scandals was made with a 4×5 camera over seven years^*19. The slow apparatus produces long observation before exposure as well as detailed images. Setting up the tripod, viewing the inverted image on the ground glass, and adjusting arrangement and focus temporarily detach the room from the flow of domestic life. Limited intervention in actual objects and camera conditions keeps the work centered on how reality changes as an image.

New Cosmos of Photography and Doubts About “Everydayness” Itself

New Cosmos of Photography began in 1991. As a university student, Yasumura attended exhibitions at P3 in Yotsuya and observed award recipients creating working contexts through their photographs^*1. During the 1990s, the competition drew attention to varied uses of private life, the body, cities, staging, and photobooks. Yasumura also chose his parents’ home, but centered the disappearance of everydayness within photography. Preparing a 4×5 camera, moving furniture and objects, and adjusting focus, color, and distance turned a private setting into a place for testing realist description. PARCO’s 2005 exhibition and the photobook Domestic Scandals presented seven years of repetition as one public series^*9. The work shared familiar subject matter with contemporary everyday photography while directing attention toward the perceptual structure that makes the everyday seem natural.

Photographic Distance Learned from Shigeo Gocho’s SELF AND OTHERS

In an IMA conversation, Yasumura described the influence of Shigeo Gocho’s SELF AND OTHERS and emphasized the importance of distance between photographer and subject even in his own photographs of things^*2. Gocho approached intimate subjects without enclosing them entirely within the photographer’s emotion. Yasumura applied that distance to the family home, a setting too familiar to see easily, and to the objects within it. Camera distance and preparation make the known observable again.

Comparing Household Goods and Public Architecture with the Same 4×5 Camera

Yasumura photographs plastic, appliances, snacks, artificial flowers, wall materials, and public-facility equipment as elements that make contemporary life. Essays in the official Domestic Scandals publication treat the family home as a stage of representation and examine social changes beneath its quiet surfaces^*18. Focus, color, and scale show how objects exist photographically without turning household goods into sentimental possessions or sociological specimens.

In 1/1, the same method turns toward regional public buildings. Domestic arrangements and architectural surfaces differ in character, yet the same 4×5 camera allows mass-produced goods, imitation materials, walls, and floors to be compared. Still life expands from the tabletop to the arrangement of objects that constitute homes and public institutions. shashasha’s artist and publication page situates Domestic Scandals and 1/1 within a continuing photobook practice^*10.

The Family Home and Public Facilities as Different Conditions of Reality

Domestic Scandals shows plastic, artificial flowers, appliances, snacks, and simulated wood or stone accumulating the time and consumer choices of Yasumura’s parents’ home. In 1/1, he moves close to walls, floors, and equipment in public facilities, ports, and gymnasiums, leaving signs of function and the building as a whole outside the frame. Art Platform Japan records the two major publications and exhibition history since the late 1990s^*11. In the first series, furniture and commodities produce domestic depth; in the second, reduced background turns walls and floors toward fields of color. Yasumura adjusts arrangements at home and removes surrounding information in public buildings while retaining the same 4×5 camera and color realism. The two series show how a sense of reality depends on depth, scale, use, material, and the amount of background. Formal consistency makes it possible to measure these conditions across domestic and public space.

Selection and Responsibility in Teaching and Jury Work

Canon’s archive records Yasumura as a New Cosmos of Photography juror for four consecutive years, from 2018 through 2021^*12. In an English-language interview, he reflects on work from his award-winning series to recent projects and discusses how photographing, selecting, and forming a series produce a finished work^*15. This continues his long-standing attention to selection after exposure, sequence, and print size. The work is not complete when an interesting object is found; the distance and scale at which its image will appear are also composed.