Shiho Yoshida’s process often begins on the Internet, where she searches for images of locations that draw her attention, after which she travels to the actual sites to photograph them. Found images and her own photographs merge in the final works, creating a fusion of multiple spaces and layers of time.
Mountains
A longstanding subject of Yoshida’s photography has been mountains, captured in the ‘Survey’ series. Mountains in her works are, however, not always recognisable as such, having been reduced to sharply contrasted diagonals of black and white or a distant, blurred horizon.
In 2022, the photography book Survey: Mountains (2021) received the 46th Kimura Ihei Award for Photography. Presented in a solo exhibition by the same title at Yumiko Chiba Associates, Tokyo, the works in the book derive from the virtual space of Google Maps, Internet search engines, and Yoshida’s own photographs.
Whale Under the Sand
Images of a beached whale and the ocean are the subjects of ‘Whale Under the Sand (Suna no Shita no Kujira)’, which Yoshida based on an event in her hometown of Chiba. Like her mountain photographs, the form of the whale is more readily recognisable in some images than in others, where the grooves on the animal’s underbelly begin to resemble an exercise in shape and shadows.
The Story of a Stone
Yoshida examined the presence of immeasurable time embedded in stone in Quarry/The Story of a Stone, her solo exhibition at Yumiko Chiba Associates in 2018. In her statement, the artist writes about a desire to investigate a subject of enigmatic origins, which led her to photograph the Ishi-no-Hōden megalith in Hyogo Prefecture. The monumentality of the megalith is reflected in Yoshida’s photographs that, whether close-up or from a distance, portray portions of its formations in one image.
