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| Taratine. By Daisuke Tokota. Session Press, 2015.  |
This week's Book of the Week pick comes from Simon Baker who has selected Taratine by Daisuke Yokota published by Session Press.
"Daisuke Yokota is quickly establishing himself as among the most innovative and original of the new generation of photographers in Japan. His subtle, layered work takes both the potential and the problems inherent to a range of photographic processes (and cross-processes) into ever-more complex structures of strata, echo and interruption. In his new book Taratine, Yokota both reveals and conceals, offering glimpses of his personal life, in both text and image; profound, compound visions which are always subject to the dizzying aesthetic filters inherent to his practice. Yokota works consistently and with great energy and application to produce images that not only tell us about the strange gaps between life and art, but about the continued vitality of the 'mysteries of the dark-room' in the digital age. His work is significant because it is drawn directly from the everyday and yet seems balanced perpetually between what is recognisable and what is not, between memories themselves and the strange unknowable systems by which memories take form: neither collages, nor montages, as such, but superimposed screens, like those from which Yokota produces and reproduces moments of ordinary magic."—Simon Baker
"Daisuke Yokota is quickly establishing himself as among the most innovative and original of the new generation of photographers in Japan. His subtle, layered work takes both the potential and the problems inherent to a range of photographic processes (and cross-processes) into ever-more complex structures of strata, echo and interruption. In his new book Taratine, Yokota both reveals and conceals, offering glimpses of his personal life, in both text and image; profound, compound visions which are always subject to the dizzying aesthetic filters inherent to his practice. Yokota works consistently and with great energy and application to produce images that not only tell us about the strange gaps between life and art, but about the continued vitality of the 'mysteries of the dark-room' in the digital age. His work is significant because it is drawn directly from the everyday and yet seems balanced perpetually between what is recognisable and what is not, between memories themselves and the strange unknowable systems by which memories take form: neither collages, nor montages, as such, but superimposed screens, like those from which Yokota produces and reproduces moments of ordinary magic."—Simon Baker
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| Taratine. By Daisuke Tokota. Session Press, 2015. |
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| Taratine. By Daisuke Tokota. Session Press, 2015. |
Dr Simon Baker is Senior Curator, International Art (Photography), at Tate. Prior to becoming Tate’s first curator of photography in 2009 he was Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Nottingham, where he specialised in surrealism, photography and contemporary art. Recent exhibitions at Tate have included Conflict, Time, Photography (2014), William Klein + Daido Moriyama (2012). He also curated Another Language – 8 Japanese Photographers for the Arles Photography Festival in 2015. He has written widely on photography and contemporary art and will publish a monograph on George Condo, forthcoming with Thames and Hudson, October 2015.