Daisuke Yokota is at the forefront of a movement of Japanese artists experimenting in photographic image making. In his recent series Color Photographs, Yokota continues to explore the perception of time through photography. In this instance, the starting point is not a photograph but a photographic negative.

Focusing on the materiality of photography, namely film and paper, Yokota creates abstract works through a novel approach of layering sheets of unused, large-format colour film, ranging in size from 4 x 5 to 8 x 10 inches. He develops the layers of unused colour film using boiling water to allow new colours to emerge as the emulsion melts and silver oxidizes, then the damaged sheets of film, which no longer can be developed, are scanned to create the final work. Yokota explains, ‘I tried to re-control time on a photograph by tuning up the particles.’

For Yokota, his experimental approach is as important as the resulting work. His expressive work inhabits an ambiguous space, vacillating between creation and deterioration, reality and dream, immediacy and distance, nowhere and somewhere. He has been the recipient of numerous awards such as the Foam Paul Huf Award (2016) and the Photo London John Kobal Residency Award (2015). His work has been exhibited internationally and is held in numerous collections, including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland.