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ProjectsFundación Mapfre

Tomoko Yoneda’s gaze, from the gallery to the screen

A Japanese photographer living in London, work that looks at history through the everyday, and an exhibition to promote. We made and produced the piece.

Tomoko YonedaCorporate video

Sound familiar?

If any of these sound like you, this project is about you.

  1. Your exhibition is photography and the images are already the best thing you have: you don’t want a video covering them up.
  2. The work is subtle and can’t be summed up in a line or a high-impact image.
  3. You want the video to resemble the exhibition: the same tone, the same care.
  4. And you need someone to make and produce it from start to finish.

That’s where Fundación Mapfre came in.

An exhibition you can’t sum up in one image

Fundación Mapfre was showing the work of Tomoko Yoneda, a Japanese photographer born in Akashi in 1965 who studied photography in Chicago and then in London, where she lives. The exhibition needed promoting with a video piece.

Her work tends to look at historical events, landscapes and interiors linked to armed conflicts, with the idea that history is still present in everyday life and not only in monuments or the remains that recall it. Work like that calls for a piece that doesn’t shout.

How we told it

Photographs in warm, muted tones, cut into strips: a sharp band between blurred copies of the same image.

  1. Still from the video: split screen; on the left, a framed photograph of a flock of birds and a camera on top of a building; on the right, bare branches against a pale sky
    01

    The gallery and the image, together

    A framed photograph, seen on the wall, shares the screen with another. The piece doesn’t hide that these are works in an exhibition: the frame and the dark gallery are in view.

  2. Still from the video: white flowers with thin petals on a black background, the image divided into strips: a sharp central band, blurred bands above and below and a vertical strip on the right
    02

    A sharp strip between blurred copies

    The photograph is cut into bands: one sharp in the middle and, around it, the same image out of focus. The eye goes straight to what is in focus.

  3. Still from the video: an indoor swimming pool with white and blue tiles; a person emerges from the water beside a ladder, in a sharp vertical strip between two blurred areas
    03

    The same cut, vertical

    A sharp strip with a person in the water, between two blurred zones. The cut changes direction from one shot to the next, but the device is the same.

  4. Still from the video: swimmers in a pool of reddish water, the image broken into boxes of different sizes, some out of focus
    04

    From the pool to a face

    The image splits into boxes of different sizes: swimmers’ faces up close next to other shots of the pool. It is the same device as the strips, now used to move closer to people.

Project details

Client
Fundación Mapfre
Project
Tomoko Yoneda
Format
Promotional video for the exhibition, built from the photographs
Production
Isla Studio

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