Hokkaidō is Blue White and Gold

“Three years ago, my friend Yann Stofer traveled from the South to the North of Japan. In Hokkaidō, through roads and landscapes, he experienced a total freedom allowing him to get closer to a highly poetic universe, as the snow has fascinating powers. It modifies the visual and auditory field.
Always in film, Yann has worked here with 24 × 36 and 4 × 5 camera; these photographs are the testimony of his emotion and his newfound serenity. Under his gaze, the landscapes are reconstructed, they escape the earthly order. We dream of immersion, of nature at the top of our lungs. Yann had even more: Japan in its mysterious dimension.
Everything seems to take another form. A dried flower at the bend of a path is inscribed as an ideogram. Everything becomes graphic in this drift to which he let himself go. Niseko, Hakodate, Obihiro, Kushiro, Abashiri, Asahikawa, like so many lines of escape and temporal pockets… We slide with him on the virgin and unmarked tracks of Asahidake, as if overcome by the magic of this country. His photographs bear witness to his amazed abandonment: Hokkaidō is blue, white, golden.”

François Simon, writer