
flowers
- Publisher
- Akaaka Art Publishing
- Year
- 2021
- ISBN
- 978-4-86541-134-8
- Specifications
- Cloth hardcover
261 x 216 mm
152 pages
Book design by Kaoru Kasai and Yuki Adachi
The first of Yoshiyuki Okuyama's trilogy of books that portray people through non-human subjects, the second being windows: an imaginary dialogue with his late grandmother, photographed in her house, which he now uses as his studio. Beams of light entering a room, trees swaying in the garden, the remnants of the grandmother, and above all flowers, photographed as if to enact the conversation he can no longer have with her. The flowers were shot on 110 film, the miniature film his grandfather used in the 1980s, which creates a nostalgic atmosphere alongside the classic decor and curtains of the house. The window, a painterly motif, joins the fluid freshness of the outside to the dim interior, and the gaze from inside to outside overlaps grandmother and photographer: flowers reflected in the window, flowers in the room, flowers in the garden. Kitchen, study and bedroom, shot with large-format contact sheets, medium format, 35 mm and Polaroid, bring in a different vision, the grandmother's gaze in life, her drifting gaze after death and his own.