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street or a building. So I wake up in early morningand walk around taking pictures and put themon the Web site.”Yoshioka studied photography at PalomarCollege in San Diego and was one of a selectgroup of photographers chosen for the EuropeanPhotography ’90 exhibition, which opened in Berlinthe day after the Wall fell (see bottom photo onprevious page.) His love of particle physics goesback to 2005, when a friend who worked atStanford Linear Accelerator Center in Californiaarranged for him to see the lab.Since then, he has prowled CERN, theEuropean particle physics center in Geneva,Switzerland; KEK and J-PARC in Japan;and Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory inIllinois, one of many stops on a honeymoon tourof the United States that included New YorkCity and Niagara Falls.“I went to CERN and these machines are sohuge,” Yoshioka says. “It’s just amazing, it’s beyondmy imagination, and it’s beautiful.”Like his black-and-white Polaroids, his digitalimages of physics labs are often manipulated.By changing the contrast or intensifying colors,he creates his own interpretation of a scene.Yoshioka seeks out obscure places anddetails—things that are hard to find on an officiallab tour, which in any case would not give himnearly enough time to get the shots he wanted.Top left and right: Fermilab, August 2007“Their accelerator was running so I couldn’ttake pictures of it, so we went lookingfor something special. We were driving aroundlooking at Wilson Hall and the patternswere very interesting.”But with his outgoing nature, he often findssomeone who will take him around and give himall the time he needs.At J-PARC, for example, “the people were really,really friendly, and they were so eager to showme—‘Come this way!’” he says. His unofficialguides, including accelerator physicist MasakazuYoshioka, showed him deep inside the lab, allowinghim to photograph empty rooms that would soonfill up with equipment: “That was really fortunate, toget a really deep insight into the facility.”In August, Yoshioka was invited to show hiswork at the UCLA-KEK-Sokendai InternationalSymposium and Workshop, which focused onstrategies for studying contemporary science inJapan and in the United States. His photos arefeatured on a 2008 KEK calendar designed byhis wife, Ayako—it is for limited distribution, notavailable to the public—and hundreds are displayedon his Web site, www.sypi.com.symmetry | volume 05 | issue 01 | jan/feb 0825