In Osaka: photographs by Yamasaki Ko-Ji (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781942180005)

I was born in 1959 in Kobe, Japan. When I was 18 years old I started taking pictures of my friends on a daily basis. One day, much later in my life, I was going through our family album, and some of the photographs my father took with his film camera got me thinking about leaving my own photographs in my own family album. I started looking for good photographs on Internet and thinking about doing photography more seriously. When I told about it my father, he gave me his old manual film camera; this was the one he was using when he took the photographs for the family album. I remember the date: it was New Year day, 2003. Then, by chance, I stumbled upon works of Takuma Nakahira, one of "Provoke" photographers, and was deeply affected, almost shocked by their message: those grainy black and white photographs matched the state of my mind perfectly. Since then, I am taking photographs to leave behind the story of my life.