Today we focus on Japanese photographer Yasuhiro Ogawa.

Born in 1968 in Kanagawa, Japan, Yasuhiro Ogawa graduated in English literature. A detail that is not so anecdotal when you look at the photographer's series, all imbued with the dreamlike and romantic Gothic spirit so typical of English literary works.

Yasuhiro Ogawa began his professional artistic career in 2000, winning the Taiyo Award that same year, during his very first solo exhibition. He then won the 2009 Photographic Society of Japan New Comer Award for his first publication entitled Slowly Down the River. Five more photobooks will follow, including The Dreaming released in 2020, then reissued in 2022 by Sokyusha and Blue lotus edition, and the latest, Tokyo Silence, released by T&M Projects in 2022.

Yasuhiro Ogawa's mostly black and white work is built around his many trips to Japan (as for his series Okinawa, Shimagatari, Lost in Kyoto, Landscape through Windows et Tokyo Silence), but also worldwide (for its series Slowly down the River or even The Dreaming).

The series the dreaming – the dream – is a geographical journey, notably passing through Japan, China, Myanmar, India, Cambodia, Tibet, and even Guatemala. But it is also a journey through time, into the past, since the artist went back nearly 30 years in his life, when he made these trips. It was in his early fifties, from Tokyo where he currently lives, that Yasuhiro Ogawa nostalgically plunged back into his multiple black and white travel negatives, printing his prints in the camera, with the impression of reliving a old dream. The monochrome shots of The Dreaming – capturing here a landscape seen from the window of a train; here a lonely snowy station platform; here natives in their daily life – are like troubled dreams, where the blurring of certain images echoes the impression of old memories from another world. A romantic, dreamlike world, as if sleeping, like the people you meet on trains, dozing or sleeping soundly.

With his latest series, Tokyo Silence, Yasuhiro Ogawa takes another trip, this time sensory, between China and Japan. This black and white series was born from an observation: the opposition between the deafening noise of the Chinese city, made up of cries, horns, loudspeakers, and the deep and strange calm of the Japanese capital, where no one no one speaks loudly in transport, no one shouts in the street, no one honks. There is certainly a perpetual background noise in Tokyo with advertisements from giant screens, sounds from gaming halls, music from shops, but it is not the noise of Chinese human activity. The photographer says he tried to capture this paradoxical silence with his Leica. This gave life to images of crowds, of speed, but where the focus on still calm human faces, with little expression, recalls Yasuhiro Ogawa's “Tokyo silence”.

Charlene Veillon

Art historian. Doctor in Contemporary Japanese Photography

• Yasuhiro Ogawa's official website: https://ogawayasuhiro.com/
• Instagram of Yasuhiro Ogawa: https://www.instagram.com/yasuhiropics/?hl=fr
• Blue lotus gallery, Hong Kong: https://bluelotus-gallery.com/
• https://la-chambre-claire.fr/livre/yasuhiro-ogawa-the-dreaming/#tab-description