shashasha

The zine-like photobook “The Scrap” represents a rare and invaluable collaboration between the Japanese photography artists Kenta Cobayashi and Daisuke Yokota.
While both artists pursue a highly experimental practice that questions the very foundation of photography in the digital age, their respective styles differ in method and focus. Yokota’s work addresses the issue of materiality in photography and often plays with the differences between analog and digital photography and the paths that connect them (such as scanning, image manipulation etc.). The works of Kenta Cobayashi, meanwhile, are that of a digital native transforming information gathered through photographic means in various ways, including the physical act of drawing.

For “The Scrap”, both artists collaborated in a way reminiscent of musical jamming (with Cobayashi explicitly stating the process was “like making music”), as Yokota and Cobayashi added new layers of manipulation and processing onto each other’s already processed images. This creative act can be seen as a response to the question of how creativity can be possible in a fully digitized world where everyone is inevitably destined to live at least partly digitized lives. The result is a collaborative work that – contrary to its title – almost needs to be regarded as a lifeform itself, or as a hint of a future to come.