Tsutomu Yamagata

Tsutomu Yamagata (b. 1966, Japan) is a documentary photographer based in Tokyo, represented by Zen Foto Gallery. Raised in Tokyo, Yamagata majored in Law at Law department, Keio University. Following many years at Business Planning Department and Human Resource Department of an energy industry, he gradually became involved with photography, later leaving his job to pursue it. He went on a long journey to Asia and Europe taking documentary pictures. He taught himself photography at the age of 35, and after attending photography workshops with Satoru Watanabe and Issei Suda, started exhibiting in Tokyo and China. He makes photo-essays for magazines, and is also a lecturer at the Japan Broadcasting Corporation Cultural Center. In 2012, he became a member of the Japan Professional Photographers Society, published his photobook Thirteen Orphans, and exhibited at photo festivals in Japan, USA, and France to critical acclaim. In 2013, he attended Review Santa Fe, was selected for Photolucida’s Critical Mass Top 50, and received a prize at the LensCulture Portrait awards.

Thirteen Orphans

“One day an old man in a plain suit sat next to me by a pond in a park. He began to put powder on his face and changed into a woman’s long-sleeved kimono. He started dancing to an enka – a Japanese popular ballad – playing on his radio cassette recorder, a big smile on his face. “What’s going on?” I was curious. He told me that he was a master of Japanese traditional dance, a homosexual, and that he had cancer. On another day I met an old millionaire in underwear who rode a clumsy bicycle, and yet another day I met a devilish-looking man who in fact was a mummy’s boy. The park is Ueno Park in Tokyo and the pond is a big lotus pond called Shinobazu-no-ike. As I went there more often, I met more people like them. Before long, I began to take photographs of them and to hear more of their stories.” – Tsutomu Yamagata

Yamagata’s Thirteen Orphans is based on encounters he has shared with the multitude of characters that visit the Ueno Park in Tokyo. Mysteriously drawn to the people that he met in the park – a magnetic power based on more than just how they look or what they say about themselves – these portraits question how to express this connection through photographs.

Yamagata approaches his subjects earnestly without categorising his subjects by type or occupation. He believes that each model has a background and character so unique that they can’t be reduced in this way, his work instead driven by a desire to express their complex and conflicting humanity.

The work is named ‘Thirteen Orphans’ after the strongest hand in the game of mahjong. In most games, series of the same type of cards and melds are collected, but in this hand all the cards are unrelated to the others. However, if one card is missing, the hand is worthless. Each is different, but combines to make the whole. Just like human society.

www.tsutomuyamagata.com/