ERIKA YOSHINO

The word ‘marble’ is derived from the ancient Greek ‘marmaron’ meaning ‘crystalline rock that shines in the light.’

Marble is a metamorphic rock, formed when limestone is subjected to intense heat, recrystallizing to create a beautiful, glossy stone.

Disparate materials are often fused within it.

A marble pattern is born on the surface of the vanilla-coloured stone, as if someone has traced gentle lines on it.

The things I turn my camera on are all from daily life.An image created by the light passing through the lens, appears on the film like a fragment of a rainbow.

A moment becomes eternity. An irreplaceable instant emerges on the surface of the print.

The title ‘MARBLE’ is a symbol of a complicated, enchanting time.To me, they provide a key that allows me to discover freedom and hope.

Captivated by the beautiful resonance of the words, I try to recall their inspiring images and express them through photography.

I will be satisfied if I succeed in capturing even their slightest nuance.

Crystals of light seen through the lens.My desire draws gentle lines on the white photographic paper.

Erika Yoshino, December 2017

Excerpted from the exhibition catalogue ’Photographs of Innocence and of Experience: Contemporary Japanese Photography vol. 14’

Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, 2017, p. 19

In this exhibition, Yoshino has likened her photographic expression, which she has rigorously confronted daily since she began making photographs, to marble of which the unique pattern is slowly created over many years in nature. Yoshino’s subjects are her everyday surroundings and her photographs require no explanation. Walking with camera in hand, she simply and coolly captures whatever happens to draw her eye. Allowing for inevitability and chance occurrences, she seeks interesting scenes, and things she does not know or understand. When she feels certain that she has seen it, she releases the shutter. Printing a sizable number of photographs, she juxtaposes and rearranges them to produce an accumulation of fragments of images that she wants to see, then goes shooting again. The repetition of this simple process—shooting and editing—creates a world with a unique ambience in which time, memory and experience are condensed and deepened. Yoshino’s roots are in street snapshot and it is a subtle constant in her recent work as they are in Just Like the Radio (2011), which marked her transition from black and white to colour. In ’MARBLE,’ the quietude and strength shown in NEROLI (2016) has formed a richer fold within the core of her independently developed sensibilities to time, which draw viewers into her unique worldview.