Title | Ourselves / 1981
Photograph | Yosuke Yajima
Design | Goshi Uhira, Clara Huber
Printing | Sun M color Ltd.
Binding | Shinohara Shiko
Published | 2015
Limited edition of 500 copies（Including of special edition 30）
Size | W212mm×H290mm×D11mm
hardcover , 52 pages
Retail price | 3,400 yen（including tax）
矢島陽介は1981年山梨県に生まれ、学生時代から独学で本格的に写真制作を始めた。2009年の「1_WALL」入選以来積極的にグループ展や個展に参加し、国内外の著名な写真フェスティバル等に入選を果たしてきた。本写真集『Ourselves/1981』は、矢島の活動の大半にあたる2010年から2015年までの作品をまとめた一冊であり、そのタイトルが示すように、1981年に関東に生まれた矢島自身が経験してきたひとつの時代とその実感を描き出している。被写体の外側にあるものも含めて時を閉じ込めるという写真の性質を利用し、矢島は写真に映り込む気配を捉える、ということに対して慎重かつ積極的にアプローチしてきた。80年代関東に生まれた者は皆、大都市が21世紀へと切り替わるいくつもの瞬間を通過し、その中で世界の手触りがはっきりと変化したのを体感した。成熟しきった社会で生活も人々の関係性や心理も「郊外化」し、大きな事件のない「今」が綿々とつながっていくという未来に悲観も楽観もなく、妙に体温に欠けた実感しか持てない。矢島はその体温の不在、不穏な予感を写真というメディアを通して注意深く、客観的に観察し、視覚化してきた。郊外と都心を往復する日常の中で、世間と自分との間に感じるわずかなズレ。そこから目を逸らさずに、丹念に撮影地と被写体を選んだ上で、自分の「感じる」世界の見え方が正しく描き出されるよう、注意深くイメージを作り上げる。矢島の写真に繰り返し登場するプレハブの壁面、引かれた図面が建材で起こされただけのようなペラリとした街の風景、顔を持たない後ろ姿。体温を持たないそれらのイメージはすべて等しく、矢島の抱える生への疑問と渇望を伝えている。≪深井佐和子（G/P Galleryディレクター）≫
Yosuke Yajima was born in Yamanashi, which is a suburban area near Tokyo, in 1981. He started taking photograph while he was a student. Since he was selected one of the winners of the “1_WALL”award in 2009, he has been selected for many solo and group exhibitions and photography festivals inside and outside Japan. The photo book “Ourselves/1981”compiles his works between 2010 and 2015, that covers literally this young artist’s entire career. As the title shows, this is a documentation of an era and feelings which Yajima himself has experienced. Knowing the nature of photography, which captures the time and air surrounding the subject matter, Yajima takes a careful and positive approach to capturing a scene, which includes not only the subjects but also the air around it. Anyone born in the Kanto area (a suburban area around Tokyo) in the 80s has been through many moments of the dynamic change of the megalopolis as it moves into the next century, and felt the transition of the physical texture of the world. In this highly developed society all lives, relationships and, feelings have become suburban-ized., They hold no particularly optimistic or pessimistic visions, or realistic feelings towards the future, which they can already easily imagine as the result of an endless sense of the world as pleasant but lukewarm. Yajima has observed and visualized this specific absence of temperature and feeling of disquiet through the medium of photography. He has been paying careful attention on a slight feeling of deviation he constantly bears, while adjust his perfectly normal life as a decent adult to confirm with society’s invisible pressures. Only photography makes its possible for him to create images, which explain his feelings, by choosing the right location, models, subjects, and lightings. Prefab walls, inorganic landscape with modern buildings that look like huge plastic models, portraits without faces. All those images without any temperature or textures paradoxically reveal Yajima’s an eager thirst and questioning attitudes towards life.
