NEGATIVE ECOLOGY
Tamaki Yoshida
Tamaki Yoshida was born in Hyogo Prefecture, Japan. While working as a commercial photographer, she has been producing artworks since 2018. She won the Canon New Cosmos of Photography Excellence Award for her first work [sympathetic resonance], in which she visualized the breath of living creatures in our close environment by capturing them and the shape of their surrounding nature with a thermographic camera. She works on the themes of contemporary issues and respect for nature and living things, using experimental and abstract methods of expression along with her research. She currently lives and works in Tokyo.
© Tamaki Yoshida - Statement -
This project began when a mistake Yoshida made while developing film negatives reminded her of how our daily lives are encroaching on wildlife and the natural world. The unevenness of the negatives caused by the development failure seemed like a threat to the world of the wild deer in the images. She began to wonder if chemicals such as cosmetics and detergents that we discharge in our daily lives are accumulating and affecting the natural world without us even realizing it, remaining hidden in the shadow of large-scale environmental damages.
Yoshida then mixed detergents, abrasives, and cosmetics that we discharge on a daily basis into the developing solution and developed the film negatives. She felt that the resulting negative film was poisonous-looking but beautiful. Yoshida believes that the resulting film represents not only the tragedy lying ahead of modern man, whose daily life is inseparably bound to these chemicals, but that it might also express a new form of coexistence with nature.