KYOTOGRAPHIE 2023 11th Edition

© Mabel Poblet Studio

© Mabel Poblet Studio

© Mabel Poblet Studio

Mabel Poblet

Mabel Poblet, born in Cienfuegos, Cuba, in 1986, is one of the rising stars of the Cuban contemporary art scene. A visual artist, her work is particularly eclectic, employing various techniques including mixed media, photography, video art, kinetic art, and performance art. She has followed a traditional academic path, first graduating from the San Alejandro Art Academy in Havana and then graduating suma cum laude from the Superior Institute of Arts (ISA) of the University of Havana.

At 36 years of age, she has already participated in major international art fairs and had over 20 solo exhibitions around the world. Her work been showcased in numerous museums, including the American Museum of Art in Washington DC, the Museo DA2 Domus Atrium in Salamanca, Spain, and the Ludwig Forum in Aachen, Germany. The Tampa Museum of Art and the CIFO-Cisnero Fontanals Foundation are among the institutions that have acquired some of her artworks for their permanent collections. In 2017, her installation Escale Valores/Scale of Value was shown at the Venice Biennial, and more recently her public art piece Genesis was unveiled at the Steven Tanger Center for the Performing Arts in North Carolina.

Poblet’s WHERE OCEANS MEET comprises a group of works on the theme of ‘sea and water’—important elements for the artist as she grew up on the island nation of Cuba.

Yuriko Takagi, India, 2004

Yuriko Takagi

Born in Tokyo, Yuriko Takagi studied graphic design at Musashino Art University and fashion design at Trent Polytechnik in Nottingham, UK. In her photographic work, she adopts a unique perspective to capture facets of the human experience through clothes and the human body. In her ongoing project chaocosmos, she follows her deep interest in the mysteries of the natural world and explores new creative approaches and media, including video. At KYOTOGRAPHIE 2023, Takagi will exhibit two series in parallel, one a diary-like project that depicts people from around the world wearing traditional clothes in their everyday lives, and the other a series on contemporary fashion including the recent collaboration with DIOR. “There are still people in many parts of the world who wear traditional clothes in their daily lives. These timeless clothes constitute an identity with deep roots to the past. I will continue my photographic journey as long as these clothes continue to convey something about the lifestyles and aesthetic senses of their wearers.” –– Yuriko Takagi

© Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

© Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

© Boris Mikhailov, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn

Boris Mikhailov

Born in 1938 in Kharkiv, Ukraine, Boris Mikhailov is a self-taught photographer. Since the 1960s, he has been creating a haunting record of the tumultuous changes in Ukraine that accompanied the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disastrous consequences of the USSR’s dissolution.
Trained as an engineer, Mikhailov was given a camera to document the state-owned factory where he was employed. He also used it to take nude photographs of his wife, and was fired after these were discovered by KGB agents. He then decided to take up photography full-time in reaction against the idealized, propaganda images that permeated Soviet life, embarking on a pioneering practice encompassing documentary photography, conceptual work, painting, and performance.
Mikhailov and his wife Vita divide their time between Berlin and Kharkiv. In 2022, a major retrospective of his work was organized at the MEP (Maison européenne de la photographie) in Paris.
At KYOTOGRAPHIE 2023, the slideshow of Mikhailov’s series Yesterday’s Sandwich will be exhibited.
One day Mikhailov inadvertently threw a bunch of slides onto the bed, and two stuck together, like a sandwich. The result was a ‘double world,’ ambiguous and poetic, juxtaposing beauty and ugliness, that acts as a metaphor for society’s contradictions at a time when encryption was the only way to explore forbidden subjects such as politics, religion, and nudity.
In Yesterday’s Sandwich, he superimposes pairs of colour slides, creating enigmatic and surrealistic images that undermine official imagery by layering it with scenes of ordinary life.

Alpha. Guinea Conakry (1999).
Left: Alpha portrayed on 1st August 2016 on board of a rescue vessel in the Mediterranean sea. Right: Alpha portrayed on 8th February 2019 in Ramacca, Italy.
© César Dezfuli

Telimele, Guinea. January 13, 2022. Lamarana, Abdoul’s brother, one of the passengers who died in Italy on January 23, 2019,
touches the ground at the place where his brother was buried in his hometown. Abdoul’s body was repatriated to his country and rests in the cemetery of Telimele, a few meters from his home. ©︎ César Dezfuli

Panel with the 118 portraits of the passengers of the rubber boat rescued on August 1, 2016 in the Mediterranean Sea. © César Dezfuli

César Dezfuli

César Dezfuli was born in 1991 in Madrid. Self-taught in photography and trained as a journalist in various newsrooms, he now works as a freelance photojournalist, focusing on humanitarian crises and international affairs. He has documented elections in Kenya, Rwanda, and Kosovo, the twentieth anniversary of the Srebrenica massacre in Bosnia, and families in China who have flouted the country’s one-child policy.
At KYOTOGRAPHIE 2023, Dezfuli’s work Passengers will be exhibited. Passengers is an ongoing project that seeks to put a human face on the migrant crisis at the borders of Europe. In 2016 alone, 181,436 migrants were rescued trying to cross the Mediterranean, while 4,576 lost their lives at sea. Dezfuli photographed 118 of these migrants minutes after they were rescued from a rubber boat drifting 20 miles off the coast of Libya, recording the expressions on their faces and the marks on their bodies that showed the state they were in after a long journey that had already marked their lives forever. He has since met with over 70 of them, living scattered across Europe. The goal of Passengers is to understand these people’s stories and what led them to leave their homes, and to awaken empathy for those who find themselves in circumstances that compel them to migrate.

Existence #11 from the series of JINEN ©︎ Yu Yamauchi

Representation #07 from the series of JINEN ©︎ Yu Yamauchi

World #01 from the series of JINEN © Yu Yamauchi

Yu Yamauchi

Born in 1977 in Hyogo Prefecture, Yu Yamauchi spends a great deal of time in natural surroundings exploring the fundamental state of our world through man’s relationship with nature.
A self-taught photographer, Yamauchi launched his career after working as a studio assistant. For his photobook Dawn (Akaaka, 2010), he spent more than 600 days in a hut on Mt. Fuji photographing the sunrise above the clouds. In 2014, he published Kumo no ue ni sumu hito (‘The Man Who Lives Above The Clouds’) (Seizansha), which focuses on Tsuguhiro Seki, the man who owns the mountain hut where he stayed, and the inner and outer dialogues that people engage in during the days they spend up in the mountains. In 2020, after traveling through Mongolia for five years, Yamauchi released the photobook Planet (Seigensha), which explores time and space in Mongolia’s various regions, the relative nature of reality, and the pluralistic structure of our world. For his upcoming work JINEN, scheduled for release in 2023, Yamauchi traveled to the island of Yakushima in the south of Japan many times over a nine-year period, once spending nearly a month in isolation in its forests in order to gauge the distance between humans and the rest of nature.
Based in Nagano Prefecture, Yamauchi holds exhibitions all over the world and continues to elicit questions about the existence of an absolute universe and the reality of our world.

IT’S THE DEEP BREATH YOU TAKE, mixed media, SERIES ALBA’HIAN ©JOANA CHOUMALI, 2022

I CHOOSE PEACE, mixed media, series ALBA’HIAN triptych ©Joana Choumali, 2022

MAYBE I GREW UP A LITTLE TOO SOON, mixed media, SERIES ALBA’HIAN ©JOANA CHOUMALI, 2022

Joana Choumali

Born in 1974, Joana Choumali is a visual artist / photographer based in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. She studied graphic arts in Casablanca (Morocco) and worked as an art director in an advertising agency before embarking on her photography career. She works mainly in conceptual portraiture, mixed media, and documentary photography. Much of her work focuses on Africa, and what she has learned about its myriad cultures. Her major awards include the CapPrize Award (2014) and the Emerging Photographer LensCulture Award (2014). In 2019, she became the first African to win the 8th Prix Pictet for her series Ça va aller (It will be ok) on the theme of ‘Hope.’ Her book HAABRE, THE LAST GENERATION, was published in Johannesburg in 2016. In 2020, she was named a Robert Gardner Fellow in Photography by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology at Harvard University.
In her most recent works, Choumali embroiders directly on photographic images, completing the creative act with a slow and meditative gesture. For KYOTOGRAPHIE 2023, two new works will be shown: the ongoing series of embroidered pictures Alba’hian will be exhibited in Ryosokuin Zen Temple, and portraits of Masugata Shopping Arcade and Belleville Market in the Treichville neighbourhood of Abidjan will be displayed together in Masugata Shopping Arcade, where KYOTOGRAPHIE has a permanent space.

© Gak Yamada

© Gak Yamada

© Gak Yamada

© Gak Yamada

Gak Yamada

Born in Ehime Prefecture in 1973, Gak Yamada became interested in photography during his student days and began to travel around world to take photographs. His fascination with Buddhism led him to visit Nepal and India, after which he suddenly began seeing visions overflowing with color and turned to painting. Encountering Daido Moriyama’s photobook Farewell Photography, Yamada found his interest in photography rekindled, and has since been taking photographs influenced by his experiences as a painter. His creative endeavors are wide-ranging, also including video direction for the stage, recitations, and sound performances. In 2015 at the Parasophia Kyoto International Festival of Contemporary Culture, he opened the ‘Miwa Yanagi Stage Trailer Project’ with a sound and reading performance.

In 2022, Yamada was selected from the KYOTOGRAPHIE International Portfolio Review applicants as winner of the ‘Ruinart Japan Award.’ In fall of the same year, he visited France to participate in Ruinart’s artist residency program, during which he created a new series utilizing photographs of grapes and leaves picked in Ruinart vineyards, stones found in the fields, champagne, and foil he brought from Kyoto. In addition to his photographic works, Yamada’s KYOTOGRAPHIE exhibition will include a video installation featuring sounds recorded in a champagne chalk cellar.

©Coco Capitán

©Coco Capitán

©Coco Capitán

©Coco Capitán

Coco Capitán 

Born in Seville, Spain in 1992, Coco Capitán lives and works between London and Mallorca. She completed her Master of Fine Arts with Honours in the field of Photography at London’s Royal College of Art in 2016. Her art practice straddles the worlds of fine art and commercial art, and includes photography, painting, installation, and prose. Recent solo shows include Naïvy in 50 [definitive] Photographs at Parco Gallery (Tokyo, 2022), Naïvy at Maximillian William Gallery (London, 2021), Busy Living at the Maison Européene de la Photographie (Paris, 2020), and Is It Tomorrow Yet? at Daelim Museum (Seoul, 2019). She has published several books, including Naïvy, If You’ve Seen It All Close Your Eyes, and Middle Point Between my House and China.
Coco Capitán will stay in Kyoto from October to December 2022 as part of KYOTOGRAPHIE artist residency, focusing on teenagers and shooting with a film camera. Her residency exhibition will feature portraits of boys and girls from traditional families, students, and street youth.

Kazuhiko Matsumura, Heartstrings ©Kyoto Shimbun Newspaper

Kazuhiko Matsumura, Heartstrings ©Kyoto Shimbun Newspaper

Kazuhiko Matsumura, Heartstrings ©Kyoto Shimbun Newspaper

Kazuhiko Matsumura

Born in 1980, photojournalist Kazuhiko Matsumura started working for the Japanese newspaper Kyoto Shimbun in 2003. Since then he has been exploring topics related to human life, social security, and care work.
He has published two photobooks: Subtle Beauty (Kyoto Shimbun Publishing Center, 2014), about the lives of maiko (geisha apprentices) and geiko in Kyoto, and Guru Guru (self-published, 2016), a personal project tracing the interwoven paths of life through photographs of birth and death in his own family.
At KG+ in spring 2019, Matsumura exhibited his series Elusive Rainbow, about the life and work of Dr. Kazuteru Hayakawa (1924–2018), a Kyoto-based pioneer of elderly-friendly medical care. Having been on the receiving end of the medical care system himself, Dr. Hayakawa possessed a multifaceted view of issues surrounding medical care. Elusive Rainbow depicts the history of social and medical care in Japan through Dr. Hayakawa’s life; it won an Honorable Mention at the 2021 Canon New Cosmos of Photography Awards.
Matsumura has also been covering dementia for many years, publishing photographs and articles in Kyoto Shimbun and various magazines. For his new series Heartstrings, he photographed four people with dementia and their families and caretakers, tracing their changing lives as the illness progresses. Heartstrings was unveiled at KG+SELECT 2022 and won the jury’s Grand Prize. At KYOTOGRAPHIE 2023, this work will be exhibited. Matsumura’s work presents his audience with an opportunity to deepen their knowledge of dementia, and softly illuminates many hidden aspects of Japan’s super-aging society.

Mount Fuji (Escapism, 2022)

Beach I (Escapism, 2022)

Making-of Escapism, 2022 (various Swiss coffee-cream lids)

Roger Eberhard

Born in 1984, Roger Eberhard is a Swiss photographer who divides his time between Zurich and Berlin. He is interested in themes related to the tensions of the contemporary world, such as territory and globalisation. In 2011, he founded the publishing house b.frank books, which focuses on photography. His series Human Territoriality won the ‘Most Beautiful Swiss Books 2020’ award. His work has been widely exhibited around the world, including in C/O Berlin and the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne.
Eberhard’s series Escapism was produced by and premiered at Images Vevey Biennial of visual arts, in Switzerland in 2022. ‘Escapism’ is “an attitude that involves withdrawing from the world and civic life for distraction or relief.” This term lies at the core of Roger Eberhard’s Escapism project, on the distinctively Swiss tradition of collecting peel-off creamer lids. Enthusiasts have swapped lids for decades, such that they have permeated the Swiss collective imagination. Eberhard’s close-up photos of exotic landscapes found on lids plunge into the heart of a very Swiss way of briefly escaping everyday life by pondering over such lids during coffee breaks. The fact that the images are grainy betrays their true nature bringing viewers back to reality.

©︎ Paolo Woods & Arnaud Robert

©︎ Paolo Woods & Arnaud Robert

©︎ Paolo Woods & Arnaud Robert

Paolo Woods & Arnaud Robert

The task of defining happiness has long been delegated to religions, philosophies or even politics. Today this universal quest seems more and more to be the province of the pharmaceutical industry, which uses all of the tools of the modern age (science, marketing and communication) to offer everyone a standardized and automatic response to this ultimate human aspiration. More than ever, to be happy is a duty. For five years, journalist Arnaud Robert and photographer Paolo Woods travelled the world in search of Happy Pills, those drugs that can repair an invisible wound, those substances that can make people take action, help them to work and to get it up, those formulations that allow the depressed to avoid total collapse, the painkillers that the working poor gobble down so that they can keep on feeding their families. Everywhere, from Niger to the United States, from Switzerland to India, from Israel to the Peruvian Amazon, Big Pharma has acted to provide immediate solutions where once there were only eternal problems.

Boy tricycle
© Dennis Morris

SOUL Sista
© Dennis Morris

Count Shelly sound system
© Dennis Morris

Dennis Morris

Born in 1960, British artist Dennis Morris has used his camera to produce an impressive body of work on extraordinary individuals. He took up photography at the age of 9, and at 11 had work published in the major British newspaper, the Daily Mirror. In 1974 he accompanied Bob Marley on his first UK tour.
Closely associated with music, Morris has created many iconic and memorable images of musicians, including album covers for Bob Marley, the Sex Pistols, and Marianne Faithfull. His series of photographs capturing the essence of the Sikh community of Southall, England, has been acquired by British government’s English Heritage.
Several books of his work have been published, including the photobooks Bob Marley: A Rebel Life and The Bollocks, on the Sex Pistols. His work has been exhibited around the world, including at Today Art Museum in Beijing; Laforet Museum in Tokyo; Arles Photography Festival in France; The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland; and The Photographers’ Gallery, The Institute of Contemporary Arts, and Tate Britain in London.
His photographs are included in prestigious public and private collections such as Tate Britain, The National Portrait Gallery, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
At KYOTOGRAPHIE 2023, works from the Growing Up Black, a chronicle of Black Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, will be exhibited, along with representative portrait works.

© Ishiuchi Miyako, Mother’s #38, Courtesy of The Third Gallery Aya

© Ishiuchi Miyako, Mother’s #49, Courtesy of The Third Gallery Aya

© Ishiuchi Miyako, Mother’s #52, Courtesy of The Third Gallery Aya

Ishiuchi Miyako

Ishiuchi Miyako was born in Gunma Prefecture and grew up in the city of Yokosuka in Kanagawa Prefecture. In 1979, she won the 4th Kimura Ihei Award for her work Apartment. In 2005, she represented Japan at the Venice Biennale with her series Mother, for which she photographed items inherited from her late mother. In 2007, she began her internationally-renowned series hiroshima, for which she photographs belongings of atom bomb victims (hibakusha). In 2013, she received the Japanese Medal of Honor with purple ribbon, and in 2014 the Hasselblad Award (known as the ‘Nobel prize for photography’).
Recent exhibitions include the solo shows Ishiuchi Miyako: Postwar Shadows (J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, 2015), Grain and Image (Yokohama Museum of Art, 2017), Ishiuchi Miyako (Each Modern, Taiwan, 2022), Ishiuchi Miyako (Stills, Edinburgh, UK, 2022), and group show Roppongi Crossing (Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, 2022). Her photobook Frida: Love and Pain (Iwanami Shoten) was published in 2016. Ishiuchi’s works are part of the permanent collections of Tokyo’s National Museum of Modern Art, the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, the Yokohama Museum of Art, New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the J. Paul Getty Museum, and Tate Modern.

This exhibition, a dialogue between two female photographers of different generations, is supported by WOMEN IN MOTION, a Kering program that shines a light on the talent of women in the fields of arts and culture. Since 2015, WOMEN IN MOTION has been a platform of choice for helping to change mindsets and reflect on women’s place and recognition across artistic fields.

From the series of Sasurai © Yuhki Touyama

From the series of Sasurai © Yuhki Touyama

From the series of Line 13 © Yuhki Touyama

Yuhki Touyama

Yuhki Touyama was born in Chiba in 1983. In 2004, she graduated from Tokyo Visual Arts University’s Department of Photography. In her work, Touyama captures invisible things such as life and death, time, sensations, and notions. Spending a lot of time creating prints in her darkroom, Touyama is able to express large swaths of time and grains of air in three dimensions.
Major publications include Line 13 (Akaaka, 2008), Sasurai (abp, 2008), THE HINOKI – Yuhki Touyama 2016–2017 (The Hinoki, 2017), and Cho kokka shugi – hanmon suru seinen to nashonarizumu (‘Supranationalism: An Anguished Youth and their Nationalism’) (written by Takeshi Nakajima, with photos by Yuhki Touyama; Chikumashobo, 2018).

This exhibition, a dialogue between two female photographers of different generations, is supported by WOMEN IN MOTION, a Kering program that shines a light on the talent of women in the fields of arts and culture. Since 2015, WOMEN IN MOTION has been a platform of choice for helping to change mindsets and reflect on women’s place and recognition across artistic fields.

Finding Freedom in the Water © Anna Boyiazis

The Cubanitas © Diana Markosian, Magnum Photos

Crying for Freedom © Forough Alaei

World Press Photo

Resilience - stories of women inspiring change.
Founded in 1955, the World Press Photo Foundation aims to show the realities of events around the world. The WPPF holds an annual photography contest, and exhibits the prize-winning works at 120 venues around the world. The World Press Photo Foundation presents a selection of stories, awarded in the World Press Photo Contests from 2000 to 2021, that highlight the resilience and challenges of women, girls, and communities around the world. Gender equality and justice is a fundamental human right critical in supporting cohesive societies. Yet women around the world face deeply entrenched inequality and remain underrepresented in political and economic roles. Violence against women prevails as a serious global health and protection issue. The exhibition conveys the commitment to women’s rights and gender equality and justice. Multiple voices, documented by 17 photographers of 13 different nationalities, offer insights into issues including sexism, gender-based violence, reproductive rights, and access to equal opportunities. The selection of stories explores how women and gender issues have evolved in the 21st century and how photojournalism has developed in the ways of portraying them.