HDR_nature

IMA gallery is pleased to present HDR_nature, a solo show of works by Yoshinori Mizutani from August 20th to September 28th.

Mizutani’s HDR_nature series offers a fresh take on nature photography. Using the latest technology, he creates images which look like painted with brush strokes. Today everyone can take photographs and there are too many photographs of nature, making it extremely difficult to come up with something new with this well-trodden and familiar theme.

Growing up in a place surrounded by nature, nature continues to call out Mizutani; he has been exploring the theme of nature in Tokyo where he is now based. For Tokyo Parrots, he followed large flocks of wild parakeets which had been imported from Sri Lanka in the 1970s as pets and become established and spread in Tokyo. In Yusurika, he transformed nature in the city into something fantastical; using flash, he turned a vast swarm of midges found in rivers and ponds into thousands of small white balls of light. He is also known for his vivid and graphical images that reveal beauty and interesting colors and shapes in everyday life.

Statement
This series is aimed at creating and exploring unknown images from the world beyond our senses using a camera. I use a technique known as HDR, which means three captures with different exposure settings are automatically combined. Because of the way photos are taken, the final photographs entirely depend on the work of the camera. Also, by moving the camera while shooting, I can get unintended results. This is a way to discover new images, and at the same time a challenge to expand the possibilities of photography.

With HDR_nature, Mizutani ventured into a new frontier in photography. HDR, short for High Dynamic Range, is a post-processing task of taking a series of images, combining them and adjusting the contrast ratios to create images as close as possible to what the human eye sees. He deliberately moves his camera around to let it combine multiple out-of-focus images. As a result, he manages to create something we have never seen before. By adopting a technology of digital photography in a creative way, he added a new page to the history of photographic expression which has always gone hand-in-hand with the development of technology.

Born in Fukui in 1987. After graduating from Nihon University College of Economics, Mizutani went on to study photography at Tokyo College of Photography. His work has been exhibited worldwide, with solo exhibitions in Tokyo, Paris, Millan, Zurich, Antwerp and Beijing.