The Color Coordination Chef: Takashi Yasumura
We’ve seen brutal, black and white Japanese photography, we’ve seen calming Japanese landscapes, captured by photographers national and international.
The works of Takashi Yasumura are neither. His photographs stick out because of their unique coordination and almost surreal color combinations. The images captured range from a pink stapler to waterfalls in Japan's backcountry.
Yasumura was born in Shiga Prefecture, a region between Kyoto and Nagoya, in 1972. He graduated in photography from the College of Art at Nihon University, and currently lives and works in Tokyo. He gained recognition in Japan and abroad thanks to his 2005 published series “Domestic Scandal”, where he documented the paradoxical beauty found in the meeting of traditional and modern objects in his parent’s house in Shiga.
The combination of traditional elements such as tatami rooms or shoji walls with modern everyday objects like a telephone or a salaryman suit create stills that seem to come from a fictional place.
Combining fiction with reality was the theme in his series “Nature Tracing”, taken between 2000 and 2004. Here, Yasumura took photos of natural elements both indoors and outdoors. From billboard paintings of rivers with traditional wall paintings in onsen of mountains or beaches, to real photographs of people in Japanese nature.
This combination always comes from a mystic and ironic angle, perfectly portraying the beauty found in the ordinary.
