Noted Photographer Michael K. Yamaoka Shows 50 Years of Iconic Images at the Newly Opened Gateway Art Center in Midtown Manhattan

NEW YORK, Dec. 30, 2014 /PRNewswire/ -- This collection of highlights from 50 years of Michael K. Yamaoka's photography, now showing at the Madison Gallery in the new Gateway Art Center, evokes a haunting sense of passing time in images of unconventional beauty that are at once a documentary of places and objects encountered in Mr. Yamaoka's journeys worldwide. This exhibition has been extended through January 10, 2015.

In the reductionist textures of erosion—the ravages of time on places and structures—the images portray, as well, similarities across culture, era, and locale. Echoes of shape, color, and pattern have been distilled in pieces from Mr. Yamaoka's wide travels in Japan, China, Hong Kong, Russia, the Czech Republic, Germany, Austria, Portugal and the Azores, France, England, the Caribbean, Egypt, Greece, and the United States, many of which are presented in this iconic collection. He focuses on favorite themes of rooftops, reflections, light, shadow, and the drama of the sky, recording and celebrating details often overlooked, fixing forever moments in time, inviting us to contemplate and appreciate their evanescent beauty.

Born in Japan, Mr. Yamaoka studied at Waseda University in Tokyo and graduated with a degree in photography from Art Center College of Design in California. He began his career in commercial photography at BBD&O in New York before opening his own studio, where his clients included AT&T, Toshiba, General Electric, PepsiCo, Time-Life and others of the Fortune 500 list. Simultaneously, he built a body of personal work, making images of day-to-day encounters outside the studio.

After the death of his son in 1997, Mr. Yamaoka concentrated solely on his personal photography, publishing a book, Odyssey, A 35 Year Photographic Journey, and establishing a scholarship in his son's memory. Shooting extensively worldwide, he continued to develop the themes of texture, stillness, and singularities in details that capture the passage of time. He has exhibited in critically acclaimed solo shows at the New Art Center and the Atlantic Gallery in New York, Tokyo, Kyoto, Nuremberg, in many cities in Bavaria, Germany, and at the German Consulate in New York. Mr. Yamaoka's work is included in private and corporate collections worldwide, and in 2008 he was honored when I.M. Pei requested a print for his personal collection.

Says Mr. Yamaoka, "I invite you to share moments in time and place captured with my camera; of beauty created deliberately by man or coincidentally by nature; a celebration of our precious world."      

The Gateway Art Center is located at 4 West 43rd Street, NY, NY, Ground Floor
www.artnyny.com • 917-692-6920 • Email
The Exhibition may be viewed 9am-9pm Tuesday-Saturday, through January 10, 2015
For more information on Mr. Yamaoka please visit www.mkyphoto.com  

Contact:
Janet Doyle
203-329-8310

Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20141229/166224
Photo - http://photos.prnewswire.com/prnh/20141229/166225

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SOURCE Michael K Yamaoka