Yasuyuki Takagi, the Chestnut and the Archive

Born in Tokyo, Japan, photographer and director Yasuyuki Takagi spent a significant portion of his life living in the United States. In 2014, after 22 years of living abroad, he returned to Japan. ‘Strangely enough,’ writes the photographer, ‘my mind, body, and self wanted to be grounded and move forward from where I left off decades ago.’ 

This feeling of disorientation, or maybe reverse culture shock, led the artist to produce the book Marronnier (‘The Chestnut’ in English). The publication is a collection of found photos gathered together by Yasuyuki Takagi from the family archives, including undeveloped negatives, expired polaroids, and analogue images taken by the photographer himself. 

The non-linearity of memory

Over the course of the project, Yasuyuki Takagi found his relationship to family and to place shifting. ‘I collected the negatives and shot the material over more than 20 years. I believe photographs bring people closer together and allow people to share the incidence of what the photos were about,’ says the artist in an interview with Pen. ‘I learned more about my relatives and the personality of individuals, which you cannot know by just looking at the photographs alone.’ 

Composed of fragments of photos and text (the latter by French artist and writer Marcelline Delbecq), mirroring the non-linearity of memory itself, there was no predefined methodology in place for this work, rather threads that emerged during the process itself. ‘I realised along the way that photographs I have collected and shot were, in brief, about hellos, goodbyes, love, and loss amongst the fun gatherings,’ says Yasuyuki Takagi. ‘I spent over two years editing by adding and subtracting the combined images till I felt I had a thread coming from all directions.’

Romantic, nostalgic, and fastidiously probing, Marronnier is highly subjective, presenting a family archive through the eyes of Yasuyuki Takagi, yet in its investigation of memory and relationships, it emanates a degree of universality. 

Marronnier, a forthcoming book by Yasuyuki Takagi, was shortlisted in 2019 for the Dummy Book Award during Les Rencontres d’Arles.