Yasuhiro Yoshioka

The first publication of artist Yasuhiro Yoshioka. A self-published limited edition, the book presents three series of nudes divided into three sections: 'Decomposition and Composition,' 'Metamorphosis Period and Inter-Periodical Phenomenon,' 'Man = Machine.' As his titles make explicit, Yoshioka's treatment of the nude breaks with the traditional preoccupations of beauty and form. recasting the idea of the body within mechanical terms. Yoshioka is ultimately less concerned with photographic expression than he is driven by rhetoric and concept. There is some similarity with Eikoh Hosoe's Man and Woman, wherein the human form is newly refashioned while expressing the immediacy of a sexual connection. But rather than referring to the photography of the period, it is more useful to consider Yoshioka's work in the context of the avante-garde art of the 1960s. Yoshioka's photographs divide the body into shapeless white blobs that are isolated from one another by darkness. In other images, his treatment of the body renders its parts indistinguishable. The book's layout serves to accentuate this effect. Yoshioka made his debut as an artist with his participation in the 1962 Yomiuri Independent. However, Yoshioka's submission to the exhibition - close-up photographs of female genitalia - was charged as obscene and removed from the exhibition.