Yokota's and Pinckers floating worlds

Max Pinckers and Daisuke Yokota are both interested in the surfaces of photography, and the limitations the two-dimensional image has in shaping our understanding of the world; make a two-dimensional image and you get a two-dimensional understanding.
Their work is about surface and adding dimensions to it in different ways, but where Pinckers questions the past frameworks of photography and looks at the historical tropes of photography and how they are embedded into our reading of images on a subconscious level, Yokota builds meanings up from the present, layering the past into his images through his repeated exposures and interventions with the primary print. The series Two Kinds of Memory and Memory Itself questions the way we take photography for granted, the way in which we learn to expect certain things and to shut other things out, especially in a country that is defined overseas by photographic cliché.
For this series, Pinckers took groups of Japanese dressed as salarymen, cosplayers, or sumo wrestlers to the fringes of urban Japan. Outfitted in suits, loin cloths, and bear outfits he took them to those Japanese places that we don’t see in Europe; the edges of streams, deserted car parks, the depths of the forest.
Yokota does the opposite. He takes the moment and then layers it with meaning; he adds memory to the image. Linger exemplifies this approach, with images made in multiple steps, each of which add traces of meaning, memory and visual history to the starting point of the Japanese body.
For Linger, Yokota photographed at what is made to look like night. There’s a man, a woman, we see them naked, line of his thigh, the curve of her breasts, in a room that is barren, filled with the furnishings of the everyday; a toilet, a phone, a chair. Outside it’s dark too. It’s an inventory of the stripped down interior. Outside, an avenue of snow mixes with leafless trees, with light fading into darkness.