
西村陽一郎 個展
小惑星
Yoichiro Nishimura | Asteroid
A Cosmos at Our Feet — A Trajectory of Vision
Minnano Gallery presents Asteroid, a solo exhibition by photographer Yoichiro Nishimura. Working with photogram and scangram, Nishimura has introduced subtle shifts in how everyday objects are seen.
The exhibition brings together works ranging from Asteroid (1989) to recent pieces. Marking forty years of his photographic practice and ten years since the publication of Blue Flower, the exhibition traces the trajectory of his vision.
Yoichiro Nishimura
Born in Tokyo in 1967.
Nishimura studied photography at Bigakko and began working as a freelance photographer in 1990 after assisting professional photographers.
Focusing on camera-less photographic techniques such as photogram and scangram, Nishimura has developed works using motifs including plants, insects, bird feathers, water, and the human body.
His work has been selected for exhibitions and awards including 20 Promising Photographers Vol.2 (PARCO Gallery), Young Portfolio (K’MoPA), the ’99 EPSON Color Imaging Contest, PHILIP MORRIS ART AWARD 2000, and TPCC Challenge 2003 (Tokyo Photographic Culture Center).
His photobook Blue Flower received the Director-General’s Award of the National Printing Bureau and the Gold Prize at the 58th National Catalog Exhibition.
■ Official Website of Yoichiro Nishimura
Exhibition Dates
June 4 (Thu) – June 21 (Sun), 2026
Opening Hours
12:00 – 19:00
Closed
Mondays
Venue
Minnano Gallery
2F, 4-14-3 Higashiueno, Taito-ku, Tokyo
Admission
Free
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Yoichiro Nishimura, Asteroid, 1989 / 20 × 24 in (508 × 610 mm) / Gelatin silver print
©Yoichiro Nishimura
About the Exhibition
Yoichiro Nishimura is a photographer whose practice centers on photogram—an image-making technique that records objects through direct exposure without the use of a camera—and scangram, its digital extension. Through motifs such as plants, water, insects, and the human body, he captures elements from everyday life while introducing subtle shifts in how they are seen. The year 2026 marks forty years since Nishimura began his photographic practice, as well as ten years since the publication of Blue Flower (2016), a photobook dedicated to his scangram works. This exhibition is structured with an awareness of that accumulated time. Included in the exhibition is Asteroid (1989), a photographic work first presented when Nishimura was selected for 20 Promising Photographers (PARCO Gallery) in 1990. The work points to the origin of a way of seeing that has continued to the present: a small yet decisive world embedded within the most familiar of subjects. That sensibility runs consistently through his current practice. The exhibition also brings together works made through photogram and scangram, spanning from pieces produced around twenty years ago to recent works. What appears in these images are beings and materials that populate our daily environment—plants, insects, aquatic life, and artificial objects. Yet their presence in the photographs differs from how we ordinarily perceive them. The darkroom in photogram, the scanner in scangram—each forms a closed environment, almost like a chamber, in which the subject and the photographer confront one another. Through light and time, a quiet exchange unfolds, and the latent state of the subject gradually emerges. How does Nishimura encounter these subjects in his daily life? And why do we fail to notice them? As one response, the exhibition presents a slideshow of the vast number of snapshots Nishimura has taken with his smartphone. Continuously published on the gallery’s website, these images reflect the rhythm of his daily life and suggest how such encounters take place. Nishimura’s photographs remain continuous with our everyday world, yet they contain what has often gone unnoticed. These are not extraordinary subjects, but things that exist constantly at our feet. As photographer Daido Moriyama has described, Nishimura’s images evoke “a journey into a sensual, alluring microcosm.” They possess the capacity to transform fragments of reality into images that appear almost dreamlike. Meanwhile, photography critic Kotaro Iizawa situates Nishimura's practice within the historical lineage of photogram, recognizing it as an attempt to connect the origin and the future of photography as a medium. Nishimura’s work engages with the origins of photography while opening new possibilities for vision along its extension. This exhibition offers an opportunity to reconsider his forty-year practice from a contemporary perspective.
Yoichiro Nishimura and Photogram
Photogram is a photographic technique that does not use a camera. In a darkroom, objects are placed directly onto photosensitive paper and exposed to light, allowing the image to be formed. Beyond the outline of the subject, variations in light transmission and distance appear as gradations and textures. The reversal of light and dark also brings the subject into view in ways that differ from ordinary perception.
Through this technique, Nishimura has worked with a wide range of subjects. Among them, living organisms appear frequently. They cannot be fixed in place, and in cases such as fireflies or firefly squid, even the light that produces the image cannot be controlled.
Not only in living subjects, but also in the irregular movement of water or the subtle changes caused by shifts in light, chance is always present in the darkroom. Within such conditions, the time spent confronting the subject becomes an essential element of the work.

Yoichiro Nishimura, Eel, 2024
20 × 24 in (508 × 610 mm) / Gelatin silver print / ©Yoichiro Nishimura

Yoichiro Nishimura, Luminescence, 2004
5 × 4 in (127 × 101 mm) / Gelatin silver print
©Yoichiro Nishimura
Yoichiro Nishimura and Scangram
Scangram is a photographic technique developed by Nishimura, in which objects are placed on a scanner and imaged during the scanning process. While extending the logic of photogram, he has continued to work with this method since around 2008.
His subjects have included familiar flowers and shells collected along the seashore. In scangram, produced through a transmissive negative process, colors and tonal values are inverted. Flowers we ordinarily recognize appear as pale, bluish forms emerging from darkness, taking on an aura distinct from reality.
Between 2008 and 2016, Nishimura produced eighty-four scangram works of nineteen varieties of flowers. These were compiled into the photobook Blue Flower (Kamakura Gendai, 2016), which received the Director-General’s Award of the National Printing Bureau and the Gold Prize at the 58th National Catalog Exhibition.

Yoichiro Nishimura, Sand Dollar, 2025
A4 / Pigment print / ©Yoichiro Nishimura

Yoichiro Nishimura, Wild Cherry Blossom, 2016
B1 / Pigment print / ©Yoichiro Nishimura
Photobook: Blue Flower
A world of pale, luminous shadows—familiar flowers revealed through scangram, a camera-less photographic technique.
Published by Minnano Gallery, this is Nishimura’s second photobook.
The book received both the Gold Prize and the Director-General’s Award of the National Printing Bureau in the catalog category of the 58th National Catalog Exhibition.
This publication is available at the gallery or through our online shop.
Edition of 500 / Signed by the artist / B4 size, hardcover / 112 pages
500 copies limited
Comment / Daido Moriyama & Kotaro Iizawa
Edit / Yoichi Tamori, Poetry / Akiko Niimi, Translation / Nobuko Kawata
Printing / Yamada Photo Process Co., Ltd.
Printing Director / Katsumi Kumakura
■ Includes a text by Daido Moriyama
There is a dream-like atmosphere surrounding the world of images created by Yoichiro Nishimura―a dream subtly cool, erotic and mysterious.
In the middle of the night, as I turn off the light and close my eyes, there appear spectacles of various lights glowing like phosphorescence in the back of the eyelids, slowly flowing across the retina. Whenever my senses experience this indefinable transition of light, I find myself immersed in Nishimura’s visions. A journey into a sensual, alluring world of the microcosms―Blue Flower is a sublimation of Nishimura’s creative sensitivity.
■ Includes a text by Kotaro Iizawa
Flowers of the Shadow
Kotaro Iizawa (Photography critic)
Photogram is one of the oldest techniques in the area of photography. In fact, it could be said to have existed before the invention of photography; there are historical records predating the creation of photography, which describes the process of capturing a photographic image, by placing the object on top of a paper―coated with silver chloride and silver nitrate―and exposing it to light.
Being fascinated by the medium of photogram, Yoichiro Nishimura has continued to apply this technique into many of his artworks over the past years. His practice is not about mere representation of a conscious revival of traditional techniques, nor a return to the source. Instead, photogram is rather a promising ground that allows him to explore and expand his new creative expressions; furthermore, the medium could indicate the possibility of new photographic expressions, still yet to come.
Nishimura has undertaken a new and original photographic technique, which he calls scangram. Scangram can be described as a digital version of photogram; it is a technique to create a negative digital image of an object, such as flowers and leaves, by placing them on top of a scanner. As much as how the form and outline of an object is captured, the biggest feature is in how the original color is reversed to its complimentary color; hence a red Hibiscus or Azalea would result in a blue-ish outcome. This visual effect is extraordinary―the flowers exude a mystic atmosphere, as if they were bathed in moonlight. Through transforming themselves from the world of the positive to the negative, “flowers of the shadow” come to light.









