Sodai Yokoyama: Remind

I went through some old family albums when I returned to my hometown a few years ago. In those albums were photos of my parents, younger than I am now, the younger me, and the blank existence of my unborn brother and sister.

Beyond the documentary nature of photographs and the nostalgic feelings that fragments of the past evoke, I am drawn to something else in the depths of these photographs: there is an essence of photography that captivates me.

Why do I continue taking photographs?

The changes in my surroundings throughout my 20s and 30s made me realise the finite nature of time for human beings, and I began to look at the range of time I possess objectively.

I wanted to confirm the existence of myself and the existence of time, and I consciously began photographing all the ‘past’ around me since 2020. The process began with the place where I was born and grew up, the house I lived in, and extended to include time spent with my family, photos from the past, and even the past of my father and mother.

Through this process, I became aware of my strong attachment to my past. This attachment represents a resistance to the disappearance of everything erased by time, an important theme in my photography.

The continuation of taking photographs is an act of capturing and visualising time as the past, and questioning the meaning of time through the existence of ‘photography’.

—Sodai Yokoyama

Pages: 200
Dimensions: 210 × 280 mm
Format: Hardcover
Language: Japanese, English
Year: 2024
Publisher: GEPPO