PICTO New York, in partnership with Squadra, is presenting an exhibition of work by the Japanese photographer Yuji Watanabe under the title "妖怪と風景 — Yōkai and Landscapes." The show brings Watanabe's pictures of Japan's supernatural folklore tradition into one of New York's best-known photo labs and galleries.

The title itself states the exhibition's central pairing. Yōkai are the ghosts, monsters and shape-shifting spirits of Japanese folklore — creatures that have haunted the country's prints, scroll paintings and kabuki stage for centuries. Watanabe sets them against the Japanese landscape, letting the natural world carry the weight of the uncanny.

Who is Yuji Watanabe?

Watanabe works within a distinctly Japanese lineage of supernatural imagery. Artists such as Toriyama Sekien and, later, Kuniyoshi catalogued yōkai in woodblock prints; modern manga and film, from Shigeru Mizuki's GeGeGe no Kitaro to Studio Ghibli's Spirited Away, carried the tradition into popular culture. A photographer who takes yōkai as his subject therefore joins a long visual genealogy, translating beings once drawn or painted into lens-based pictures.

By photographing spirits in real landscapes rather than illustrating them, Watanabe pushes the folklore out of the archive and back into the terrain it supposedly inhabits — mountains, forests, water and weather.

What does the venue tell us?

PICTO New York is part of the PICTO group, the storied Parisian photo lab founded in 1950, whose printing ateliers have long served photographers working at the highest level of fine-art and editorial practice. Its New York space, alongside the partner gallery Squadra, regularly mounts exhibitions that connect photographic craft with contemporary image-making.

Hosting a folklore-driven Japanese series in a venue rooted in the technical culture of fine printing is a deliberate fit. Work about spirits and atmosphere rewards exacting print quality, where tonal depth in a night forest or a mist-covered ridge does much of the storytelling.

Why yōkai, and why landscapes?

The pairing in the title suggests Watanabe's method: the landscape is not a backdrop but the co-author of the picture. In Japanese tradition, yōkai are not free-floating monsters; they attach to places — a bend in a river, a mountain pass, an abandoned house. A photography series that keeps them tied to the land honors that logic.

For viewers in New York, the exhibition offers a chance to see how contemporary Japanese photography handles national mythology without slipping into costume or kitsch. The strongest folklore photography treats belief seriously, photographing the ordinary world until it begins to look inhabited.

Whether Watanabe's spirits appear explicitly in the frame or hover at the edge of perception — the enduring question in this genre — his series argues that the Japanese landscape itself remains the country's oldest haunted medium.