Yoshi Takata Biography
Yoshi Takata (1916 - 2009) was born in 1916 in Yusima Mikumi-cho, near Tokyo, Japan, and moved to Paris in 1954. Her photographs are often animated by a strange strength and sense of humor which distinguish his work from that of his contemporaries as he searches for peculiar and incongruous moments of Parisian life. Coming from a large industrial family, Yoshi Takata became interested in journalism and got her first job as an interpreter assistant at the Agence France Presse in Tokyo in 1947. There she met the photographer Ihei Kimura, who introduced her to photography. When she left the AFP in 1954, Kimura asked her to accompany him on a trip to Paris and it was there that she met the noted humanist photographers Édouard Boubat, Brassaï, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Doisneau. Discovering Paris alongside them, Yoshi Takata perfected his practice, inspired by their ability to capture touching moments of poetic realism. In 1955, Yoshi Takata met Pierre Cardin during a reportage he did on the couturier. She photographs her studio and, encouraged by Cardin, dedicates herself to fashion photography, which she has been practicing for more than forty years. Yoshi Takata accompanies Pierre Cardin on all his travels. From 1968 she became the main collaborator and responsible for the activities of the Cardin house for the Far East. In Paris he met and drew portraits of many celebrities, of all nationalities and backgrounds, from Richard Nixon to Orson Welles but also great figures of contemporary art such as Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Alberto Giacometti and Salvador Dalí. There are also portraits of Marguerite Yourcenar, Jean Genet, Maurice Béjart, Jean-Paul Sartre, Gloria Swanson, François Truffaut and Marlène Dietrich.
