Book&About | Makoto Oono

All living organisms purchased and captured on the Internet are dropped on a daily life. Makoto Oono uses a variety of places, including animals, plants, fruits, fish, insects, everywhere as a test site, and is temporarily inserted until the end of photo shooting.

The living organisms, which is the key element to this process, moves in an unpredictable way that makes us human beings anxious.

By arranging some mysterious artifacts into the composition to add an extreme “unbalance” of the meaning of what these components are, this could no longer be identifiable as “what this picture is”.
For this reason, the seemingly completed photo holds a harmony of chaos and disruption, which then becomes further complex in multilayers when it collectively becomes Z type book.

This work is collection of traps named "SEPARATE HIDDEN RULES". The title was inspired by a surprising discovery of how the living organisms have a hidden will and a programmed gene that has a direction that moves freely.

Every subject has a name, but it could be said that that is the word that unravels the subject itself.

His approach shows the possibilities of photos in modern cities and filled with both brutality and beauty simultaneously.

"Bunches of living things are collected through the Internet.

Various living things are crossing over country borders for trade.

They are strange, too near to be really valued.

They are hidden so I extract them."

- Makoto Oono

JAPAN PHOTO AWARD 2016

- Simon Karlstetter | Der Greif

I was immediately intrigued by his ability to use light, color and composition – the basic principles of crafting photographic images – to create idiosyncratic pictures.

One thing that particularly struck me about Makoto’s work is the way he addresses our western consumerism in a weird conjunction with living organisms.

Makoto orders »the organism« – as he calls it – on the internet and »injects« them into his images. The images are showing excerpts of our daily surroundings.

The fact that he takes a very interesting, often times close look already makes his imagery special. He uses still images that he neatly composes, but every image comes with a slightly surreal twist – you discover cocoons, broken eggs, moths, ants inhabiting Makoto’s images.

As these »organisms« play an important role, they give the genre of »still life« a very interesting and individual reading.