Above: Exhibition detail of Yusuke Yamatani’s Rama Lama Ding Dong at Yuka Tsuruno Gallery, Dec. 2015
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“I found out that they had a darkroom upstairs where amateur photographers got together every day. Even though I was using a digital camera, I’d always been more attracted to film photography. I thought I could make prints every day if I lived there, so I asked the owner of the cafe on the spot if I could move in there and he said yes. I stayed there just like that and moved into a flat he owned. I met Shomei Tomatsu then and he took me under his wing. He said to me “Show me 500 photos per week.” So I shot with a digital camera and created contact sheets for him to see. He’d tell me which ones were powerful or weak. This went on for three months.”
– Yusuke Yamatani, on living in Nagasaki in 2010- in conversation with critic Kotaro Iizawa
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The entire interview is a good read- Yamatani’s experience with Tomatsu demonstrates the need for putting in work. Later on, he discusses his choice of using Fujifilm Neopan 400 for his honeymoon series Rama Lama Ding Dong - and even more interesting, Iizawa, perhaps the foremost authority on the work of Nobuyoshi Araki, discusses the relationship of Yamatani’s own documentation of his honeymoon with that of Araki’s Sentimental Journey.
Read the full interview here: Yusuke Yamatani: Showing the Realities of Contemporary Culture