Yoshinori Mizutani

sakura 003 – Yoshinori Mizutani, Colour, Photography, Japan, Sakura, Spring

2015

Yoshinori Mizutani’s works suggest new expressive possibilities that mix the domestic traditions of personal and street photography with those of foreign conceptual photography. Mizutani graduated from the Tokyo College of Photography in 2012. He has won several prestigious awards, including the Japan Photo Award in 2013, as well as Foam Talent Call and LensCulture Emerging Talents Top 50 in 2014. His series “Tokyo Parrots” was on view at this year’s Bienne Festival of Photography in Bienne, Switzerland. His foray into photography is fairly recent - he started 5 years ago. Nonetheless, his photographs do demonstrate an innate understanding of how forms, colors, textures and depth translate to the pictorial plane. He is working with a visual vocabulary that has been well established by the work of many photographers active today. Mizutani’s work serves as a good gauge of the visual tropes and photographic styles that are prevalent among young photographers in Tokyo. Yoshinori Mizutani says - The themes of my work are every day and the familiar. What is familiar to me, however, could be new to the viewer. It could also be revelatory or something previously overlooked. It is the viewers’ varied responses to and interpretations of images, which makes photography interesting.