Naoya Hatakeyama

Hatakeyama, Naoya (b. 1958), Japanese photographer. Hatakeyama's first major series, begun in the 1980s, was Lime Hills. It comprised colour photographs of the workings of lime quarries. The photographs were incisive descriptions of large-scale human interventions in the landscape. There seemed to have been an unusual moral and aesthetic poise behind the camera: Hatakeyama observed without obvious commentary. He showed the purposeful stripping away of hillsides, as if the event had the elegance of an orange being peeled. Man-made hillsides vied with, and became confused with, natural ones. Then came the Blast series, which captured flying debris caused by the explosives laid by mining engineers. He found a hideous beauty in these walls of flying rock. Alongside these works, which he continues to make, Hatakeyama is photographing another series—Untitled—which shows what happens to all this extracted material. The Untitled photographs are taken from high vantage points like the Tokyo Tower. The colour prints, each 22.5 × 46 cm (
8 4/5 × 18 1/10 in) are exhibited in grids of 48 or more images. The city seems both sprawling and homogenized, orderly and variegated, artificial and organic. Paradoxes and equipoise epitomize Hatakeyama's oeuvre. (He is also a noted architectural photographer.) River and Tunnel, two connected series from the late 1990s, were published as Underground in 2000. The first traces a river flowing through Shibuya, the Tokyo district where Hatakeyama lives: each view is horizontally bisected by the edge of the river's concrete bed. Above are the man-made tower blocks, below is the river, contrasted, compared, but also balanced—leaving us to question our assumptions. Tunnel takes us into the dark void beneath the city, where we gradually make out a strange symmetry between the structure and its dark reflection. In 2001 Hatakeyama made a series titled Slow Glass in Milton Keynes, England. Views of the city were seen through rain on a car windscreen, each drop acting as a tiny, inverted camera image of the scene. These deft postmodern pictures are as much about the perceiving mind behind the camera as they are about the places beyond the glass.

— Mark Haworth-Booth

Bibliography

• Berg, S. (ed.), Naoya Hatakeyama (2002)