Ryosuke Toyama - Leading Light

In 2008, Ryosuke Toyama embarked on a journey around the country to portray Japan's next generation of traditional artisans. Born into a family specialising in Yuzen dyeing and fascinated by crafts, Toyama decided that in ten years' time he would also create photographs worthy of being considered crafts. He experimented with techniques from the early days of photography, seeking to produce images that have a strong sense of presence as objects. Revisiting the same artisans a decade later, he used ambrotype and a homemade camera to capture them once more. 'Leading Light' is a collection of essays and works that describe his fifteen years of trial and error.