SHINJI OTANI
www.shinjiotani.net
Shinji Otani is a photographer. On the recommendation of Willem van Zoetendaal, the Virtual Museum Zuidas invited him to participate in the Free Spaces AIR 2010 in combination with Virtual Zoom, the VMZ’s photography project. His photographs will be included in the collection of Foam, photography museum of Amsterdam.
Shinji Otani was born in Japan to a family of ceramicists. He studied ceramics at the Kyoto University of Art and Design. In 2003 he came to the Netherlands to study at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. At first he concentrated on ceramics, but ultimately switched to photography, graduating in that field in 2007. Otani was subsequently nominated for the Steenbergen Stipend, the Nederlands Fotomuseum’s award for young photography graduates. In addition to working as a freelance photographer, Shinji Otani works on commission and is the right hand of photographer Koos Breukel.
Rather than using photography to record what is visible, Otani concentrates on capturing the invisible, focusing in particular on the space between people and their objects in specific situations.
Results of the Residency: ‘Parabolic Duties’
In the photographs made during his stay in the Zuidas, Shinji Otani has taken an objective position. He searched for traces of personal life in neutral business spaces and shows the results in two successive series of photos. In his first series, he concentrates on the indoor plants in office buildings. In the second, he photographs the interiors of Japanese ex-pats, who work in great numbers in the Zuidas, and for whom life and work largely converge. Their apartments belong to the company, just as do many of their possessions. In this way, he once again makes visible what normally remains hidden from our eyes.
