Itagaki


		YOSHIO ITAGAKI

	Although people are different in many ways, I always enjoy finding something in common among us. This is one of the most important parts of my work. In the last two years, I have taken many pictures of tourists taking pictures of themselves at sightseeing spots. They are often from different countries and have different backgrounds but they all do the same thing—take pictures. Is that human instinct? I create images of tourists in the future. In contrast, I simulate the colors of nineteenth- century hand-colored black-and- white photographs. In this way, my work visualizes this timeless event— taking tourist pictures.

Born in 1967 in Nagoya, Japan, Itagaki attended Tama Art University in Tokyo, where he studied art and design. In 1995 he received an M.A. in studio art from New York University. He also attended the International Center of Photography in New York.

During the past two years, he has focused his lens on tourists photographing themselves at popular sightseeing spots. He is intrigued by the international appeal of this activity—that so many people from different countries and backgrounds all engage in the same behavior. His work is not meant as a commentary on tourism as consumption, however. Instead, he explores the seduction of photography, which, with its magical ability to capture the moment, freezing it in time, has profoundly altered daily life for more than a century. In inserting tourists into moonscapes, or in simulating nineteenth-century hand-colored prints, Itagaki suggests the timelessness of the picture-taking act. At the same time, he alludes to the notion of hyper-reality, that is, reality fragmented by technology. Once considered futuristic, this concept has in recent years become familiar and even nostalgic through photography, which has evolved from its former status as a new technology to become an part of our everyday reality.