The radiance of life. Photos of Akira Utiyama Automatic translate

The riot of elements and dynamics in the pictures of one of the most famous art photographers in Japan.

For the Japanese photographer Akira Utiyama, Russia is like no other country connected with swans. Every year, he watches how flocks of noble birds fly from Siberia to Japan, gain strength there and return to Russia again six months later.

For many years, the photographer not only admired the swans wintering on a pond in the Oike forest park in the city of Murakami, but also photographed them, cherishing in his heart the dream to someday arrange an exhibition of these works in Russia. Over five years of birdwatching, he took more than 450,000 photographs.

Steadily improving his skills, Akira Utiyama abandoned the traditional logic of building a frame and developed his own innovative techniques that give his work a special expressiveness. The photographs of Akira Utiyama are full of sensuality, have a complex rhythm and meter, are characterized by easy phrasing, vast repetition spaces and floating intervals, as if the swans depicted on them suddenly became participants in a kind of opera performance.

The photographer uses special “fresco giclee” paper for printing, coated with a special compound made using ancient Japanese technology. The amazing quality of the printed pictures allows you to compare them with oil painting, and the shades in the photo do not change depending on the angle of view.

The author wants to hope that the deep symbolism of the travel of swans from Russia to Japan and vice versa through photography could be appreciated by his beloved Russian composers Borodin and Tchaikovsky. But most of all, Akira Utiyama would like his work to be liked by the Petersburg audience: the artist attaches particular importance to the exhibition in the cultural capital of Russia.