shashasha

Diary: 12 pages included

Gazes interplay with Brigitte Fontaine’s music

The deep despair and chaotic excitement. Tension and Slackness.
Erika Yoshino, unaware, tells of the hidden danger –

Photographer Erika Yoshino (1970-) has been releasing many black and white works as a street photographers in exhibitions, and has been received well and is considered to play an important role in contemporary Japanese photography. Critic Shino Kuraishi once praised her as a “savage sniper” due to the wild feeling of her snap shots that capture people gatherings at downtown areas and resort spots from a very short distance with very rough framing.

Since 2010, Yoshino has started taking colour photographs, and images taken until July of the same year have been collected in this photobook “Just like on the Radio”. The scenes are located in Tokyo and northern Kanto, and her eyes do not only capture the people walking by streets, but spans from a marsh of vacant land that shines blue, a room with white curtains, the grey asphalt of the parking lot after rain, or the inside of a bike shop. The characteristics of her photographs, which is the coexistence of violence and delicacy, is not lost in her transition to colour, and the random transitions in her attention have a certain velocity and rhythm telling the reader a constantly fresh and unexpected story.

Erika Yoshino’s new style of photography gives new forms of enjoyment, and is formed here as her first complete photo book.

Included in the appendix is a diary written at the time the photographs were taken. The entries that cannot be described as fiction or a memorandum also show her unique style.

The title “Just Like on the Radio” is a direct reference to the song “Comme a la radio”, sung by Brigitte Fontaine and performed by Art Ensemble of Chicago in 1970.