Colors

Yoshinori Mizutani is a Japanese emerging photographer, born in Fukui in 1987. He moved to Tokyo to work and study, graduating from the Tokyo College of Photography in 2012. Last year he was selected by FOAM in the annual Talent Call, allowing him to grow from an online platform to a highly selective and elitist one and, in 2014, he became one of the young talents to follow. He was then able to exhibit in Europe and East Asia and invited to participate to various exhibitions for emerging photographers.

His atypical and meticulous vision, perhaps spontaneous in his stylistic research, developed an interest in photography only in recent years when, lost between the multitude of Tokyo's markets, came in contact for the first time with photo books, leaving him stunned and dazzled.

The project Colors started in 2010 after four years of research and collection of images – taken from his everyday life nestled in a larger container that is a megalopolis like Tokyo – and has taken the form of a book, giving greater depth to these skilfully and meticulously stolen snapshots. He states: "sometimes photography without context is enough – sometimes the lack of context gives depth to the picture, a resonance, gives us space to examine the banality of the subject and its inherent beauty." Mizutani shots are strongly bold in colour and composition, geometric abstractions scattered around the city, portraits where the real protagonist isn't the subject but the concept, able to lead to different photographic styles, linked by a single conductor, the neat and remote flash power with which he fixes the image, dynamic yet static. "I shot a naked woman holding a pile of books. I think of that as a still-life. Others are definitely street snaps. For me, it's important to explore the world but I don't feel tied to any particular genres. Photography reflects what I see, feel and imagine, so I think photography should remain totally free."

Today, perhaps, taking a good photograph isn't the most important thing but to be able to tell one's own time, stories that overlap one another, day after day, removing one's inherent uniqueness and just turning the act of seeing into a broader portal that provides access to an image bank, a bank of stories, that tells so much more than the place where it was taken, or the face that portrays; it tells the course of the world and its slow evolution towards a single, to which everyone will refer, one day.

Buy the book here