Masao Yamamoto

Box of Ku

XII INTERNATIONAL MONTH OF PHOTOGRAPHY IN MOSCOW ‘PHOTOBIENNALE 2018’
Year of Japan in Moscow

Masao Yamamoto. A Box of Ku

Project presented by Etherton Gallery

As part of the Photobiennale 2018 the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow presents an exhibition by the Japanese photographer Masao Yamamoto from the Etherton Gallery collection.

The images of Masao Yamamoto are often compared to haiku, short poems striking for their simple and precise images taken from nature. Yamamoto works with the technique of silver gelatin printing, manually ageing and delicately tinting the images, trying to emphasise the fragility and transience of his pictures. The sequence and location of his shots are also very important to the artist, so Yamamoto has specially created several unique photo installations for museums and galleries. The MAMM exhibition will feature the series ‘A Box of Ku’ (ku means ‘emptiness’ in Japanese), ‘Nakazora’, ‘Shizuka’ (Cleanse) and ‘Kawa’ (Flow).

Masao Yamamoto was born in 1957 in Gamagori City (Aichi Prefecture), near the centre of Honshu, the largest Japanese island. He studied painting before taking up photography full time in 1993. Yamamoto has published many books, most recently ‘Tori’ (Radius Books, 2016) and ‘Poems of Santoka’ (Galerie Vevais, 2016). Other publications include ‘Small Things in Silence’ (Editorial RM, 2014); ‘Kawa = Flow’ (Kochuten Books, 2011), ‘Omizuao’ (Nazraeli Press, 2003), ‘Santoka’ (Harunatsuakifuyu Sousho, Japan, 2003), ‘The Path of Green Leaves’ (Nazraeli Press, 2002) and ‘A Box of Ku’ (Nazraeli Press, 1998). Yamamoto’s images have been exhibited at museums and galleries in the USA, Europe, Japan, Russia and Brazil. His work has been reviewed in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, Photonews, Black and White Magazine, Unseen, etc.

Masao Yamamoto’s photographs are included in the permanent collections of the International Centre of Photography, New York; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris; Princeton University Art Museum; Harvard University Art Museums; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Centre for Creative Photography, Tucson; the Sir Elton John Collection, the J.P. Morgan Chase Art Collection, and many other private and public collections.

‘I began taking photographs in 1993,’ recalls Masao Yamamoto. ‘I have taken many different approaches to photography over more than twenty years. But one thing has remained constant: my belief that man is just a small part of nature, that humanity and nature are inseparable entities. I try to convey a state of conciliation in my work’.

Yamamoto currently lives and works in Yatsugatake Nanroku (Yamanashi Prefecture, Japan).