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  ©Kozo Miyoshi

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  ©Kozo Miyoshi

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  ©Kozo Miyoshi

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  ©Kozo Miyoshi

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  ©Kozo Miyoshi

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  ©Kozo Miyoshi

Kozo Miyoshi (b. 1947) began his career as a photographer in the 1970s. In 1981, Miyoshi began photographing with an 8×10-inch large-format camera and spent the 1980s producing numerous series on the quintessential Japanese landscape and its people, including Innocents, Picture Show, and Conservatory. In the 1990s, he spent five years in Tucson, Arizona, where he created series such as Chapel, Southwest, Airfield, Cacti, and In the Road, which capture an almost palpable sense of time in detailed, meticulously arranged photographs.

After his return to Japan, Miyoshi embarked on long trips through the country and documented his journeys in works such as Sakura, Seagirt, Tokyo Drive, and Somewhere, Sometime, and, following an upgrade to a 16×20 ultra-large-format camera in 2009, Yubune, Sabi, Ringo, and Mayu.

The work presented in this exhibition is a continuation of Kozo Miyoshi’s 1996 series Cacti. In 2019, he travelled to Arizona again for the first time in more than twenty years, returning each year, excluding the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, until 2025 to photograph various cacti with a 16×20 camera. The main focus of this work is the giant saguaro cactus, a species with a reported lifespan of 150 to 200 years that can grow up to twenty meters in size.

While in the 1996 series the focus lay on quietly observing individual, solitary cacti, this new work sees Miyoshi take a more encompassing approach. Using a less restrained, more natural perspective, he depicts his subjects together with their surrounding scenery, capturing the specific atmosphere and light of their habitats.

The exhibition features approximately 30 gelatin silver prints, contact-printed from photographs taken with a 16×20 camera.

Kozo Miyoshi

Recent solo exhibitions include Childhood (PGI, 2024), Dig a Well (PGI, 2022), SHASHIN (Canon Gallery S, 2021), On the Road Again & YUBUNE (BOOKS f3, 2020), SAKURA (PGI, 2020), MAYU (PGI, 2019), On the Road Again (PGI, 2017), RINGO (PGI, 2015), 1972～ (gallery 916, 2013), SABI (P.G.I., 2013), YUBUNE (P.G.I., 2012), SAKURA (1839 Contemporary Gallery, Taiwan, 2011), SEE SAW (P.G.I., 2010), SAKURA (P.G.I., 2009), Somewhere, Sometime (P.G.I., 2007), Tokyo Drive (P.G.I., 2006), Seagirt (P.G.I., 2004), SAKURA (P.G.I., 2003), CAMERA (P.G.I., 2002), Tokyo Street (P.G.I., 1999), In The Road (P.G.I., 1997).

Recent group exhibitions include New Old School 2 (AXIS Gallery, 2023), The Crystallization of Photographic Expression and Technique, FUJIFILM Photo Collection Special Exhibition (FUJIFILM SQUARE, 2023), Farewell Photography: The Hitachi Collection of Postwar Japanese Photographs: 1961-1989 (Phoenix Art Museum, USA, 2022), Longer Ways to Go (Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, USA, 2018 and Phoenix Art Museum, USA, 2017), In the Wake: Japanese Photographers Respond to 3-11 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, USA, 2015), The Spiritual World (Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, 2014), Reinventing Tokyo: Japan’s Largest City in the Artistic Imagination (Mead Art Museum, 2012) among others.