A survey in small prints, from the 1990s to the present
Yamamoto Masao is a 2025 photobook by Masao Yamamoto, published by kiku label on the occasion of the inaugural exhibition at 風光 huko, a photography gallery that opened in a renovated townhouse in Kyoto's Okazaki district in October 2025. The book is bilingual, presented in Japanese and English across 72 pages, bound as a hardcover with white cloth boards and a tipped-on cover image. Its dimensions are 270 × 233 × 19 mm.
The volume does not confine itself to a single recent series. It draws on Yamamoto's practice from the early 1990s through to more recent work made with large-format cameras and glass wet plates, situating earlier photographs alongside later developments. The subjects recur across decades: birds, animals, trees, flowers, skies and landscapes, organized around Yamamoto's view of human life as continuous with the natural world.
Yamamoto's original photographs are made on film and printed in gelatin silver, then worked further through toning, scratching and the application of paint — treatments that give the source prints a handled, physical surface. These descriptions refer to the artworks reproduced within the book rather than to any physical alteration of the printed pages themselves. The visual logic owes something to Yamamoto's early training in painting and to his use of empty space; the accompanying texts draw a comparison to haiku, images that gesture toward a mood or scene without settling on one reading.
The book includes an afterword from huko titled "Echoes of Constructed Space," alongside an explanatory text written by Yamamoto for the gallery. Production is credited to Kazuya Sudo of discovery go inc., with design by Takahisa Suzuki of 16 Design Institute and printing by Fujiwara Printing Co., Ltd.
About Masao Yamamoto
Masao Yamamoto (山本昌男) was born in 1957 in Gamagori City, Aichi Prefecture, Japan. He began his art training as a painter, studying oil painting under Goro Saito, before turning to photography. His practice is distinguished by small-format prints treated as individual physical objects — dyed, toned with tea, painted on, and torn — and by installations that arrange these prints to suggest a larger, cumulative view. His recurring subjects include still lifes, nudes, and landscapes.
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