Yōichi Midorikawa (緑川 洋一, Midorikawa Yōichi; 1915–2001), birth name Satoshi Yokoyama (横山 知), was a Japanese…
Yōichi Midorikawa (緑川 洋一, Midorikawa Yōichi; 1915–2001), birth name Satoshi Yokoyama (横山 知), was a Japanese photographer from Okayama prefecture, Japan, who became one of postwar Japan's leading figures in color landscape photography. He first took up the camera after graduating middle school in Okayama, but his father forced him into studying Dentistry. He returned to photography as a hobby around the same time he opened his own dentil clinic in 1937. Throughout his life, he maintained his base in Okayama. He later joined the Chūgoku Photographers Group, alongside figures such as Shoji Ueda, and Ginryūsha with Tadahiko Hayashi and Shōtarō Akiyama. HIs first work appear in monthly photo competitions in the 1930s. His early work, produced during the Pacific war, focused on photojournalism, followed by documentary photography depicting fishing villages, salt fields, rural communities around the Seto Inland Sea, and Osaka Merchant districts. From the 1950s onward, however, he turned to experimental forms of expression, employing techniques such as multiple exposure, long exposure, photomontage, filter works, and special film processing to create his dreamlike landscapes. He began using color film in the early 1960s, before it had come into widespread use. His breakthrough came with the1962 photobook Seto Inland Sea / Setonaikai, which won several awards from the Japan Photo Critics Association and the Photographic Society of Japan Award. Thereafter, he continued his exploration of landscape photography, taking photos of Japanese national parks and other natural sites throughout Japan. He is often described as a “magician of color.” Over the course of his career, he published more than seventy photobooks. Midorikawa's photographs have been widely exhibited in Japan and internationally, and his works are represented in major public collections such as the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, the Yokohama Museum of Art, Victoria and Albert Museum. And the Bibliothèque national de France. Midorikawa's photographs were included in Donald Richie's travel memoir titled, The Inland Sea, about the region and its disappearing traditions. The exhibition Midorikawa Yoichi and his Circle: The Early Years, 1938-59, held at the Okayama Prefectural Museum of Art in 2005, sought to reexamine Midorikawa's early works in order to trace the process through which he developed the richly saturated colors, multiple exposures, and other experimental techniques that culminated in the landscape photographs of the 1960s, earning him the epithet the “magician of color.” Curator Naruhisa Hirose surveys Midorikawa ‘s first appearances in the photography magazine Shashin Salon to his various photo series from the 1950s, and his relationships to contemporaneous photographers including Shoji Ueda, Shōtarō Akiyama, Tadahiko Hayashi, and Takeji Iwamiya.
Famous People from Setouchi, Okayama
Setouchi, Okayama: 3 people
Yumeji Takehisa (Japanese: 竹久 夢二, Hepburn: Takehisa Yumeji; born Mojirō Takehisa (竹久 茂次郎, Takehisa Mojirō), 16…
Yumeji Takehisa (Japanese: 竹久 夢二, Hepburn: Takehisa Yumeji; born Mojirō Takehisa (竹久 茂次郎, Takehisa Mojirō), 16 September 1884 – 1 September 1934) was a Japanese poet and painter. He is known foremost for his Nihonga illustrations of bijin, beautiful women and girls, though he also produced a wide variety of works including book covers, serial newspaper illustrations, furoshiki, postcards, and patterned washi paper.
Torajirō Imada(今田虎次郎, 1859–1940) was a Japanese police chief who became the first director of Sotojima Hoyoen, a…
Torajirō Imada(今田虎次郎, 1859–1940) was a Japanese police chief who became the first director of Sotojima Hoyoen, a leprosy sanatorium in Osaka, Japan from 1909 to 1926. He admitted the autonomy right of the patients' association. The Sotojima sanatorium was destroyed in Muroto Typhoon in 1934 and it was reconstructed as Oku-Komyo-En Sanatorium, Okayama Prefecture.