While still enrolled at the Nihon University College of Art’s Department of Photography, Noriaki Yokosuka, together with the creative staff at Shiseido, attracted attention with their novel, contemporary style of advertising visuals. Right after graduating (in 1961), Yokosuka started working as a freelance photographer, and has been active worldwide as a leading figure in the realm of advertising photography for more than 40 years.

His advertising photographs are today renowned as immortal works of great significance in Showa era (1920s-80s) Japanese advertising. Yokosuka won a Japan Advertising Artists Club Encouragement Prize, an Art Director's Club (ADC) Special Prize, and a Mainichi Advertising Design Award for a Shiseido advertising campaign in 1963. He went on to publish a series of advertising photographs, such as “Make-up Tokyo” with art director Makoto Nakamura in 1964, and in 1966, “Taiyo ni aisareyo,” a collaboration with the graphic designer Eiko Ishioka, which ushered in a new era in the world of advertising. In 1983, Yokosuka expanded his activities on an international scale, when he became the first Japanese to work as a freelance photographer for the Italian and French editions of Vogue. Furthermore, in 1975, his TV commercial for Suntory Whiskey (starring Sammy Davis Jr.) won a Grand Prize for advertising in Cannes, and another Bronze Prize in the festival’s advertising category 1981.

Next to his work as an advertising photographer, Yokosuka’s output as a photo artist is rather extensive as well. In 1963, he received Newcomer Awards from the Photographic Society of Japan and from the Japan Photo Critics Association respectively for “Mode-in” and “Kuro.” Other works unveiled in the 1960s and 70s include “Shafts,” “Nude,” “Optics” and “Cave,” followed in the 1980s by “Sayoko” and “Luna,” two Kodansha Publication Culture Award winning series of photographs of the fashion model Sayoko Yamaguchi. In 1989, “A Case of Exposure” received an Ina Nobuo Award. In the 1990s, Yokosuka published “Jikan no niwa,” a series of solarized color photographs capturing scenes from internationally acclaimed Bauhaus master Oskar Schlemmer’s dance piece “Triadic Ballet;” “Eros no heya,” employing the early 20th century technique of platinum printing; and “Enantiomer,” drawing from all available photographic techniques. Unpublished works include the “Homage to Man Ray” series of photographs of originally created art objects.

(Image by Taichi Hiratsuka)