foam magazine #14 / meanwhile
portfolio text
Seeing and Experiencing ~ The suggestive work of Masao Yamamoto
by Sarah Maso
Flashing orange lights, a squeal of breaks followed by the noise of smashing glass. In the twilight of a late-December afternoon, the Amsterdam City Council is emptying the large bottle-bank containers in the street. It’s a daily occurrence in Amsterdam and it doesn’t normally make anyone turn to look. Artist Masao Yamamoto (b. 1957 in Gamagori, Japan), busy installing his latest exhibition, immediately reaches for his Nikon F100 camera, walks over to the gallery window and starts taking a range of shots of the ungainly truck. The gallery staff watch the artist in amazement. They’ve never taken any notice before of the emptying of the bottle bank into the body of a truck. If anything the racket accompanying the event annoyed them. That changes, however, the moment Masao Yamamoto starts to photograph it. Conscious observation or looking at a subject from a different angle
can produce fresh insights. It may even contribute to the enrichment of our personal lives and in that respect Yamamoto’s work offers a helping hand in various ways. To Masao Yamamoto, photography is a way of taking the world in; he consumes life by photographing it. So it seems natural that much of his work takes his home environment in Japan as its subject. The artist lives at the foot of Mount Fuji, an hour’s drive from Tokyo. This mountain (3,776 m. or 12,388 ft.) has one of the most beautiful symmetrical peaks in the world, is surrounded by lakes, waterfalls and virgin forests, and boasts an enormous variety of mountain plants. This environment has inspired a collection of delightful little palm-sized photos of dreamy landscapes, birds, elegant women, skies, waterfalls or trees, most of them taken from unusual viewpoints that result in extraordinary compositions. It is an approach that enables Yamamoto to capture even the less beautiful things in such a way that they form completely aesthetic images. He has an ability to depict even quite unpleasant features of the modern era, such as telephone wires or smoking factory chimneys in a landscape, in romantic images that give rise to an agreeably dreamy state of mind. His work evinces a talent for combining virtuosity as a photographer with the fresh gaze of a child. The smoke rising from factory chimneys enters into an almost symbiotic relationship with the sky it stands out against. He thereby demonstrates that everything in the world has a special place, consistent with the philosophy he disseminates, the notion that every existence and every element is as valuable as the next.
Installation shots. Exhibition Masao Yamamoto at Galerie Gabriel Rolt 2007/08 © Masao Yamamoto/Galerie Gabriel Rolt
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