My landscape photographs are a mixture of documentary and fiction. By researching the mutual relationship of people and the environment, I study how people are influenced by their environment and how they change their environment in order to clarify the mechanism of landscape formation through photography. I select photographic subjects carefully and invite the viewers into his landscapes where the fictions and realities are assembled inseparably. My static landscape photographs employ a private perspective as well as a bird’s-eye view. An individual and a society, memory and history, and life and environment: My photographs remind viewers that there are various perspectives to interpret the landscape and the interpretation depends on each viewer’s perspective. Understanding the landscape requires a creative process.
Camouflage
Snow casts a white veil over my familiar sight and changes it to a new landscape. Snow conceals everything, at the same time, it wraps invisible things and make them visible.
Camouflage is originally something that I cannot see. Camouflage melts into the background of my life.
Both of the whiteness of snow and the camouflage are similar to an emptiness of the landscape. This work “camouflage” encourages you just to stare at the blank space.
I know that there are a lot of invisible things surrounding my daily life. It seems useless to turn a photographic lens toward the “nothingness.” When I could just make out any figure in the blank, I cannot even realize whether it actually exists or if the images are projected from my mind,
I think photography can work to record the world as well as to project fictions of my mind toward the world.
The more I desire to find the world, the more the fictions keep me away from the world. I am just able to sense the actual world only through the fiction I make. Photography is my private documentary that I can record when I live in my fictional world. - Yozo Takada
Camouflage, focuses on the creation of the large-scale snow sculptures for the annual Yuki Matsuri (Snow Festival) in Sapporo, Japan from 2008-16. The people in camouflage uniforms are local armed forces, Jieitai, correctly called the Self-Defense Forces of Japan who have a base nearby.
ABOUT THE ARTIST: Yozo Takada hails from Sapporo, the capital of Hokkaido, the northern island of Japan. He currently works in Tokyo and manages SheepStudio. Yozo studied at Tsukuba University and received a Fellowship for Overseas Study from the Japanese government in 2008-09 to photograph in the United States. His work has been widely exhibited in Japan including at Place M (M2 Gallery), Nihonbashi Institute of Contemporary Arts, and the Sapporo International Art Festival. His work has been exhibited in the Joseph Gross Gallery at University of Arizona, United Photo Industries in New York, and Workspace Gallery in Lincoln. http://www.sheepphoto.com/work.html