Below are two new bodies of work by one of our longest represented artists, Yamamoto Masao. Japanese photographer Yamamoto Masao approaches his work with an “active passiveness.” He is active in his observations of Nature, but passive in his understanding that he is an inextricable part of Nature itself. Living in a forest, he photographically “harvests” what he calls “treasures breathing quietly in nature.” For Yamamoto, the act of making a photograph is like picking up a rock on the beach and holding the universe in your hands. Yamamoto is premiering his latest body of work utilizing the 19th century Ambrotype photographic process. Each unique Ambrotype is a wet collodion plate varnished by the artist and floated within a handmade frame. As the artist states, “The fluidity of this collodion process shows us an accidental and unknown world. I feel the time has rewound and I am traveling back to the origin of photography.”
Showing simultaneously with the Ambrotypes, Jackson Fine Art presents for the first time Yamamoto’s Tomosu Series - Tomosu, meaning “to put a little light in the darkness.” The series evinces Yamamoto’s quiet interest in the human form and the natural world. Yamamoto tries to evoke a large range of emotions through mere suggestion. We see dreamlike, nostalgic, and pure images of landscapes, birds, still lives, portraits and nudes within this series. But what we are looking at is hard to define and one is free to form their own interpretation.
