Tokyo-based photographer Yota Yoshida’s “poetic expressions in the everyday”

Yota Yoshida is a Tokyo-based street photographer who focuses on public space and how people interact within it. His series From Somewhere to Elsewhere sees him capture people going from one place to another in such a way that Yota removes himself completely from the image. “I have a particular interest in the invisible things like various emotions and poetic expressions in the everyday,” explains the photographer. “I don’t ask permission to take the photos, because I think unposed photographs capture what is being expressed in the surroundings, which is important to me.”

The challenge for Yota in this series was being unable to plan in advance what he wanted to shoot. “Similarly, I didn’t think in my mind: ‘I want to create something like this’. What started to happen was that I picked up common themes in various photos and discovered the story from that,” says Yota.

The series is based on movement and how people navigate their landscapes, creating some beautiful moments in the series. Yota’s unknowing subjects create visual puns with their environment, or clusters of people stand in unintentional formations. The glimmer of faces is just as powerful as we see people obscured by windows, walls and clipboards, and in other images they occasionally lock eyes with Yota’s lens.