Motoyuki Daifu

Motoyuki Daifu was born in 1985 and is currently based in Kanagawa, Japan. He is a representative of the youngest generation of Japanese photographers who as inspired by Nobuyoshi Arataki by taking snapshots to represent his personal life. He mainly focuses on his own family members and house environment, taking the cluttered house to his advantage. This gives the images a fuller and more humorous look. He started photographing seriously at the age of nineteen and went to art school for it. Daifu now has numerous publications including the photobooks “Lovesody” (Little Big Man Books, 2012) and “Project Family” (Dashwood Books, 2013). I was drawn to the chaos of his photographs and liked how it was realistic, not perfect. It more or less links to my personal study as I’m looking at family and bonds , which can be seen in his work.

Analysis:

I chose to analyse this image because it’s not perfect and neat like the images we are used to seeing. I personally don’t think the image is staged, based on the rest of his photographs. It would be very time consuming to make this whole set and then destroy it in order to live “normally again”, and that’s simply not what Motoyuki Daifu is like. He calls his series an exploration of “the extraordinary within the ordinary”. In this picture we can see a woman, most likely Daifu’s own mother, sitting at a table and eating with chopsticks. She seems to not be paying attention to him at all and just enjoying her food peacefully which contrasts he rest f the phonograph. The table is overflowing with bowls, bags, coffee mugs, sauce bottles, food containers etc. It’s slightly titled upward making it feel like it made slide out the image straight into the viewer’s space. There’s an overwhelming amount of colours in this photograph due to the different things of the table, but also because of the yellow tint all his photographs have.