When I saw hundreds of parakeets swarming in the sky, I was struck by fear. I felt as if I’d walked into the Alfred Hitchcock film The Birds. I found out that these parakeets were brought to Japan in the 1960s and 1970s from tropical regions to be sold as pets. They had since gone wild and made Tokyo their home. Today, they are thousands of them. I chased them for about a year afterwards. I used strobes to photograph the parakeets in the evenings, when they went to their nests. These parakeets aren’t supposed to exist in Tokyo, but they do. And it’s the intensely uncanny feeling I felt when I first saw the swarm, which I’ve captured in these photographs.
Born 1987 in Fukui, Mizutani attended the Tokyo College of Photography after graduating from Nihon University College of Economics. In 2014, was selected for the LensCulture Emerging Talents Awards Top 50 and the Foam Magazine Talent Call. Mizutani has quickly established a worldwide recognition and amassed an impressive list of solo exhibitions in numerous countries. He has so far published 4 books :‘Tokyo Parrots’(2014), ‘Colors’ (2015), ‘YUSURIKA’(2015) and ‘HANON'(2016). He lives and works in Tokyo.
https://www.yoshinori-mizutani.com/
