Seen: Yangon
Who: Yoshihito Muta
Where: 3rd District Gallery, Shinjuku
When: August 15 - 24, 2014 / 1pm-8pm
Muta is one of 3rd District’s members and has been holding several exhibitions of his work each year there since 2009. On his profile page (link) you can see samples of his work by clicking on the dates or titles of the shows- then click on the sample image to bring up the larger sized scrolling online galleries. A great example of his Tokyo street work is the wonderfully titled “since 1988 lookin’ for the face" series.
Yangon is also known as Rangoon in English. The show is made up of images he took to Burma just this past June- about six or seven weeks before the show. He said in his statement that he leisurely walked around with ten rolls of film and had no objective or timetable of any kind. The pictures reflect this mindset.
Interestingly, for the show Muta printed not just the entire 35mm frame, but also the surrounding edges including the sprocket holes of the film. Laying bare the physical element of the material used to make these pictures like this possibly correlates to the openness of the town and the people he photographed. He’s not using artifice to enhance his idea of a place, but rather through transparency shows he has nothing to hide. The place and his pictures are good enough as is.