Naoko Yogo: GRANADA

Naoko Yogo's 'Granada' is a selection from a series of previously unseen black and white photographs. After the shooting of each frame in some 40 rolls of film the artist herself never saw those images again and the prints have been processed and developed posthumously. In 'Granada' Yogo looks at the landscape of rural southern Spain from a specific viewpoint. That view is wholly isolated but yet not lonely and the landscape itself objectified, almost abstracted, through a consideration of scale and the choice of the monochromatic. Seeing from the perspective of hindsight Yogo's photographs are now as much an eulogy on memory and on loss as was Roland Barthes' text on photography, 'Camera Lucida'.

To some extent this new work is a continuation of her major series 'Night Photographs' (2004-5) which she made in London and the Czech Republic and exhibited in Tokyo and Nagoya in the summer of 2005. The use of chiaroscuro in the documentation of the nocturnal cityscape evokes the pleasures and fears of un(fore)seen solitude. The Granada series is complementary through the consideration of similar themes transposed to a rural landscape. Yogo exploits the verticality of the Sierra Nevada mountains and the physicality of the ravines made by the confluence of three rivers through her processing of light as a sculptural material.

Naoko Yogo (1971 - 2005) was a Japanese artist who lived in London. She studied Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art & Design completing her studies in 1998. While a student her work was concerned with the three-dimensional, yet her preferred medium of expression always remained photographic. Yogo travelled alone with her camera and what she offers the viewer through her images is as much about contemplative reflection on the self and one’s own internal spaces as about the topographical and the lyricism of place.

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