SONY

Minami Yamanaka Photo Exhibition andante

The wind that you can feel now and the wind that will blow in the future are different, and the plants and trees you see tomorrow will probably be a little different than they are today. Even if the external shape is similar, I can no longer touch the same thing as at this moment. Is it possible to keep things connected by focusing on the events that change day by day and capturing them in photographs? In our hurried daily life, our sense of life is gradually becoming dull. I myself was on the verge of this; yet I continued to photograph with a certain urgency. After several years of photographing in this way, I began to see that the familiar phenomena, such as the movement of the sun and the changes of nature, are always present. A large breath of air enables us to feel the freshness of the season of leaves as they change from flowers to leaves. By staring at these things that are familiar but tend to be overlooked, we can shorten the distance between us and our sense of life. The great forces of nature that surround us, the contours of the earth, are all there with certainty. I react instantaneously to the slight transitions of things that remain the same, and photograph them. The title andante is a musical term meaning as fast as you can walk.

Minami Yamanaka Profile

Born in 1997 in Tokyo, Japan, graduated from the Nippon Photography Institute in 2019, founding member of the Koma Gallery, an independent gallery that opened in the spring of 2021. Held the exhibition andante (2019) at Alt_Medium and regularly holds solo exhibitions at the Koma Gallery. Creates photographic works based on the theme of the existence and mechanism of natural phenomena in daily life. Major works include Picking Today's Flowers, which focuses on the nature of the land itself and the activities of people, and Fragment of the earth, which looks at nature and human time by tracing the path of the changes of stones over tens of millions of years.