'I look at a photograph. It’s a photograph I took in the past. It was not so long ago that I took the photograph. Enough time has passed, however, that I cannot clearly recall the time when I shot the photograph. What was I thinking when I took this photograph? I probably did not mean anything special, but I must have been conscious of something. What was that consciousness? I cannot recall. Or perhaps I no longer know such consciousness. If I shot the photograph, I must have been present at the scene in which the photograph was taken. The photograph exists as a connection between the photographic subject, camera, and me. The photograph remains mainly unchanged, while experience changes memory. The memory and the photograph were created in the same place but they exist differently in time. The past appears fixed, but transforms according to changes in my consciousness.'
– Daisuke Yokata
Daisuke Yokota was born in Saitama, Japan, 1983. Graduated from the Nippon photography institute in 2003. Selected the honourable mention of ‘the 31st Canon New Cosmos of Photography’ in 2008, and the grand prix of ‘1_Wall Award’. Yokota had his solo exhibition 'Site/Cloud' at G/P gallery, Tokyo in 2013. He has also been exhibited his works in many shows including ’New Cosmos of Photography Tokyo Exhibition 2008’, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, ‘1_Wall Exhibition’, 2010, Guardian Garden, Tokyo, ‘MP1: Expanded Retina’, 2012, G/P gallery, Tokyo, ‘On the flow’, 2012, G/P gallery, Tokyo. Yokota recently joined the photographic group AM Projects, which features a number of European photographers and is represented by Doha-based East Wing Projects. Currently he is exhibited in a solo exhibtion at FOAM Amsterdam as a selected artist Outset / Unseen Exhibition Fund 2013.
Yokota’s photographs look like classic Daido Moriyama images, but he has arrived at his style and method through entirely organic means. He claims director David Lynch and musician Aphex Twin as influences; due to the way they distort sensory information in their respective works. Yokota is attempting to introduce ideas of fade, reverb and echo to photography, and this is what’s led him to his unique approach. To create Back Yard, he used a painstaking method in which he printed out his photographs and re-photographed them up to 10 times. Through an intentionally careless developing technique, he introduced new distortions into the image each time that the film was processed. Along with this process of re-photography, he has also used modified versions of the same image in different projects.
