Galerie Camera Obscura presents Yamamoto Masao : Saru.
This new exhibition by Yamamoto Masao presents a body of photographs made throughout his work on a theme close to his heart: animals. And among them, more particularly the astonishing images of a community of monkeys (Saru in Japanese) that he has been following for several years.
Yamamoto writes in the preface to the book Saru, published by éditions Textuel:
I am regularly struck by a powerful revelation: all living beings – and indeed all existences in this world – are of equal value…
When I observe a colony of monkeys, I see the innocence of the young at play, the tender affection between parents and their offspring, the way they seem to enter into meditation when they bathe in the hot springs.
In their presence the image of the fully illuminated Buddha Amida appears.
Perhaps they are our true teachers, those who take care to remind us of the deep essence of existence, which humanity is gradually forgetting: what it means to live.
For Yamamoto, following in this the Japanese tradition and sensibility, nature is inhabited by spirits and invisible forces. Many years ago he left his city, Yokohama, to settle in a secluded house at an altitude of a thousand metres, on the edge of a forest, facing Mount Fuji. It is there that he works essentially, seeking to capture in his photography the small moments of wonder that an attentive and sensitive spirit discerns in the everyday.
«When I look back, I realise that the only coherent motif in my work is my obsession with small things. I feel joy when I discover apparently insignificant things that are easily overlooked.» He wrote in the preface to Small Things in Silence (RM editions, 2014)
Yamamoto’s photography is indeed devoted to the tiny pleasures of the eye, to details of the world whose contemplation opens the doors of poetry and imagination. Like a child sitting in the grass, he captures the wonder-filled face of things.
And, naturally, by virtue of his sensibility and his place of life, his gaze turns essentially towards nature and animals.
Photographers, like fabulists, sometimes try in their own way to reweave the threads between the animal world and the human. Yamamoto shows us that our ancient connivance with nature, even greatly attenuated in the artificial and technical environment we have created, has not entirely disappeared, and that everything is a matter of gaze and sensibility.
Yamamoto Masao was born in 1957 in Gamagori, a small coastal town in Aichi Province, Japan. After studying fine arts, he turned to photography. His first exhibitions in Japan took place in the early 1990s, but it was in the United States, where he began exhibiting regularly from 1994, that he achieved real success and his artistic career took on an international dimension. In 1998, he published his first book with Nazraeli Press.
In 2006, Galerie Camera Obscura presented Yamamoto’s first solo exhibition in Europe. His audience has continued to grow and he is regularly exhibited around the world.
The exhibition comprises around sixty prints made by Yamamoto in a limited edition of twenty for the Kawa series and forty for the Nakazora series.
Yamamoto Masao will be present at the gallery on Saturday 4 July to sign two new books
Yamamoto Masao : Saru
June 12 – August 1, 2026
Opening on Thursday 11 June at 5 pm
Galerie Camera Obscura
268 Boulevard Raspail
75014 Paris
www.galeriecameraobscura.fr
