The world of Yoshinori Mizutani’s photographs leads to a critical observation of images and their use within contemporary Japanese society. From a nostalgia-laden perspective and a desire for poetic sublimation, the photographer develops an intimate approach, in which the book becomes a privileged vehicle for these observations.
The pictures and the layout of Taxi Dirty Book hit the reader like an airbag, and then the shock occurs again, after the accident, mirroring a two-tier society where the gaze and the looks are clogged by an obsession with security, which goes beyond all forms of tradition.
Taxi Dirty Book is Yoshinori Mizutani’s first book. It presents two-fold page mirrors. On the one hand, Taxi features frontal images of taxi drivers in their cars, taken while wandering around the streets of Tokyo. The repetition of both the point of view and image composition paradoxically generates its own deletion, while providing the viewer with various points of reference within the landscape, like a balance between private and public space.
Conversely, Dirty Book presents several photographs of books or magazines discarded on the ground in Tokyo’s various surrounding areas.
Yoshinori Mizutani Taxi Dirty Book
Softcover, 48 pages, 208×295 mm
978-2-940409-69-3