Taratine

Taratine is Daisuke Yokota's first US monograph, published by Session Press in 2015 in a limited edition of 500 copies; it was shortlisted for the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation PhotoBook of the Year Award.

The 160-page softcover book joins two previously unpublished bodies of work: photographs from a 2007 road trip through the Tohoku region, and a 2014 series shot in a Tokyo hotel room. It also includes an essay written by Yokota recalling childhood summers and an afterword by curator Marc Feustel. The Tohoku pictures take their title from Taratine, an ancient ginkgo tree in Aomori prefecture long venerated by women for its associations with fertility.

Known for a technical and aesthetic kinship with the Mono-ha movement and with Provoke-era photographers Daido Moriyama and Takuma Nakahira, Yokota turns here toward the confessional Japanese photographic tradition of the "I-novel," in the lineage of Nobuyoshi Araki's Sentimental Journey and Masahisa Fukase's Ravens. The book centers on the women in his life: his mother in the Aomori pictures, his girlfriend in the Tokyo ones.