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  ©Mitsuya Okumura

Mitsuya Okumura, New York-based photographer, has been photographing what he sees and feels in his photography career so far. Bridges in Manhattan, natural landscapes at Catskill in New York, and parks in Connecticut, etc., these are all what means something to him. Bulidings, trees, grasslands, lakes, stones, these familier subjects to us exist silently but certainly in the sophisticated photographs by Okumura.

Okumura also likes to photograph gardens, parks, historical monuments, and ruins which is man-made objects. Based on rich aesthetic sensibility as well as keen sense of design, Okumura’s photographs becomes not only neat but also capturing human exsistance, and it brings us of sense of wonder and rejoice. There are triangle?or quadrangle natural shape carefully placed in a square image of Okumura’s photographs, in addition to a group of dots and lines, lights and shadows are effectively placed. With Rich tonal gradation, photographs of Okumura have their certain presence as photographic prints, and they naturally bring pleasure to us to see. Mitsuya Okumura visited the Southwest in July 2003 and June 2004.

In 2003, he made his way around a place called Great Circle in Arizona, stopping along the Navajo and Hopi Indian reservations there, and ended his trip at Chaco Canyon, New Mexico. At Chaco he photographed a ruin called Pueblo Bonito, and though he had no knowledge of its history, the wall left an impression in his heart. Consequently, he made another trip to the Southwest in 2004.

“The walls of building of Chaco are unique and strange, and have a different characteristic from room to room. Their existence is beyond my understanding but I can feel their history exuding from the stones”, said Okumura.

Most of the photographs in the exhibition are of the stone ruins in Mesa Verde, Hovenweep, Chaco, and Salinas, and were taken in 2004. 

Around 40 images on 11×14 and 16×20 inches printing paper are exhibiting at the exhibition.

Mitsuya Okumura
Born in Tokyo, 1951.
Graduated from the Musashino Art University, 1973
Graduated from San Francisco Art Institute, M.F.A., 1975
Moved to New York, 1978
Selected One-person Exhibition
2000 “OKUMURA: Photographs/Hanami”, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Madison, New Jersy
1999 “Angle of Silence II”, Photo Gallery International, Tokyo
1995 “Angle of Silence”, Photo Gallery International, Tokyo
1988 “Polarized Dream”, Photo Gallery International, Tokyo
1983 “Divined by Dreams”, Photo Gallery International, Tokyo

Exhibitions at PGI