Title: flowers
Artist: Yoshiyuki Okuyama
AKAAKA
21.6 x 26.1 cm
152 pages
Cloth hardcover
Design by Kaoru Kasai & Yuki Adachi
Text by Yoshiyuki Okuyama
English & Japanese
May 2021
ISBN: 978-4-86541-134-8
The book ”flowers” is an imaginary dialogue between Okuyama Yoshiyuki and his late grandmother. The pictures were taken in her house, which Okuyama uses as his atelier. The everyday scenes there, such as beams of light entering a room, or trees swaying in the garden, are the remnants of his beloved grandmother. Okuyama photographs them, flowers in particular, as though enacting the conversation with her that he can no longer have.
For his flower photos, Yoshiyuki uses 110 film, which his grandfather used as well in the 1980s. This miniature film creates a nostalgic atmosphere that works well with the house's classic decor, its unique ambience.
Flowers are the medium of the imaginary conversation, yet they hint at its impossibility. The out-of-focus image of a flower in the light implies the unreachable. A flower indoors, next to its reflection in the window, or flowers in a vase, isolated from the garden in bloom: these too hint at that gap. The only way to close this distance, the only way to make the conversation feel real, is to keep photographing flowers in his grandmother's house.
Windows are another key motif in flowers. Okuyama uses them to frame and contrast the energy of the outside world with the dim indoors, and also to convey both the gaze of the artist outward and that of nature inward.
“flowers” is full of layers. Multiple perspectives coexist in one image. There is also a layer of family history. We see images of the past, such as old family albums and furniture treasured by Okuyama's grandmother, and he juxtaposes old film types and printing formats with new methods: scanned images and freeze-frames. This variety alludes to the number of eyes that have seen, and are still seeing, the lives in the house.
- From the publisher’s website
The book ”flowers” is an imaginary dialogue between Okuyama Yoshiyuki and his late grandmother. The pictures were taken in her house, which Okuyama uses as his atelier. The everyday scenes there, such as beams of light entering a room, or trees swaying in the garden, are the remnants of his beloved grandmother. Okuyama photographs them, flowers in particular, as though enacting the conversation with her that he can no longer have.
For his flower photos, Yoshiyuki uses 110 film, which his grandfather used as well in the 1980s. This miniature film creates a nostalgic atmosphere that works well with the house's classic decor, its unique ambience.
Flowers are the medium of the imaginary conversation, yet they hint at its impossibility. The out-of-focus image of a flower in the light implies the unreachable. A flower indoors, next to its reflection in the window, or flowers in a vase, isolated from the garden in bloom: these too hint at that gap. The only way to close this distance, the only way to make the conversation feel real, is to keep photographing flowers in his grandmother's house.
Windows are another key motif in flowers. Okuyama uses them to frame and contrast the energy of the outside world with the dim indoors, and also to convey both the gaze of the artist outward and that of nature inward.
“flowers” is full of layers. Multiple perspectives coexist in one image. There is also a layer of family history. We see images of the past, such as old family albums and furniture treasured by Okuyama's grandmother, and he juxtaposes old film types and printing formats with new methods: scanned images and freeze-frames. This variety alludes to the number of eyes that have seen, and are still seeing, the lives in the house.
- From the publisher’s website
