Yasuhiro Ogawa’s Journey of (Re)awakening

Twenty-seven is often cited as a mystical number. For photographer Yasuhiro Ogawa, it symbolises 27 years, a period in his life that began when he took a ferry from Kobe to Shanghai to set out on a trip across Asia, one that saw him travel to such countries as China, Myanmar, India, Cambodia, and Tibet. These successive journeys, of which he embarked upon many over the years, and the artist’s perspective on what he experienced, are compiled in a book of photographs entitled The Dreaming, published in 2020.

Born in Kanagawa in 1968, Yasuhiro Ogawa received a BA in English Literature from Kanagawa University. He started out in photography when he was in his twenties, and was influenced by the work of Franco-Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado. He received the Taiyo Award for his solo exhibition Futashikana Chizu (2000) and the Newcomer’s Award from the Photographic Society of Japan (2009). The artist was also shortlisted for the Oskar Barnack Prize (2006).

A voyage through lived moments

The Dreaming is a compilation of 86 black-and-white photographs that feature moments, emotions, faces, and dreamlike landscapes that the artist shares with the public.

In what is described as ‘a stunning, somnolent journey through a monochrome world’, the artist transcribes his experience of these moments. The public do not discover places, landscapes, and lifestyles, but rather people and their expressions, figures, gestures, and snowy and misty atmospheres. As author and photographer Robert Dunn states in an article for Photobook Magazine, ‘the book is more a series of painted scenes than anything like the expression of how the world’s “dull, steely” eyes rip into an artist.’

On a different note, the artist set about re-transcribing the work of impressionist painters with his camera in 2018, in the project Voyages Impressionnistes. He visited twelve locations represented in paintings by Monet, Renoir, Sisley, and Van Gogh.

The Dreaming (2020), a book of photographs by Yasuhiro Ogawa, is published by Sokyusha, available from the in)(between Gallery bookstore.