Wed Jul 23, 2008 – 09:55
Original Post:
Photographing the Fallen Sky / tokyo art beat
Born in 1959, Naoya Hatakeyama is one of Japan’s leading
contemporary photographers. Earlier this year, he held a solo
exhibition of his new work ‘Ciel Tombé’ at
Taka Ishii Gallery, and he is currently showing works in the “Heavy Light: Recent
Photography and Video from Japan” exhibition being at the
International Center of Photography in New York until September 7.
What led you to start taking photos?
That was simple. I was studying design at university, where I met a
person called Kiyoshi Ootsuji. I found his photography interesting, and
that’s what led me to start studying photography. Once I started
studying, I found it more and more interesting and have kept at it ever
since.
Looking at your work, it is clear from several of your
series, ‘Blast’, ‘Lime Hills’,
‘Underground’ and now ‘Ciel
Tombé’, that you have a fascination with the earth
and underground spaces. What started this fascination?
One thing is that I like it. Well, it’s a kind of preference.
When it comes to the inherent qualities of things, I like things that
are hard rather than soft. My interest in photographing rocks and the
earth is not so much about concepts as it is about this kind of
preference that I have within me for things that have hardness to them:
rocks, metal, things that are prickly. I start out with that kind of
simple feeling, but then the quarries and lime hills that I have
photographed all relate to personal stories of mine. It starts from the
kind of place I was born, and from then it’s become a bigger and
bigger issue. I realized that the Lime Hills that have recurred in my
work have a unique character to Japan and have been valued for a long
time. I was living in Tokyo and my perception of the city started to
change as a result. And that theme has recurred in my work ever
since.
These series all revolve around the same core themes, but
articulate them in different ways. The ‘Blast’ works are
overt and spectacular, whereas the ‘Lime Hills’ images
dwell on the man’s slow, selfish chipping away at the earth, and
yet the mood is gentle. The ‘Ciel Tombé’ works
show both the result of man’s excavation and the force of gravity
itself. How conscious are you of the differences in each series as you
make them?
I’m not entirely sure what my final aim is, but when I think
about my work, I feel that I want to increase the visual vocabulary.
I’m getting to the point in my life where I want to shore up what
I have achieved so far. So once I have enriched that vocabulary to the
best of my abilities, I’m looking forward to seeing how it all
works out as a whole.
How do you see this visual vocabulary relating to spoken
and written language?
Words and images are intimately connected. People look at
photographs and all kinds of words come to their minds, they find
themselves creating a narrative and creating meaning. So I want to
focus on things that, as far as possible, are fresh and haven’t
been seen before.
I think that words are the basis of all things. This is a bit of a
diversion, but photography in Japan in the 1980s was very
anti-literature. To tell someone that their work was
“literary” was the worst possible insult you could
make.
When I started studying photography, people who were about ten years
older than me were using the word “literary” in a really
bad way. It’s hard to believe it now, but that’s how it
was. There are still some traces of that attitude today. Some people
say, without giving it any thought, that they take photographs because
they are bad at expressing themselves in words. I want to know what the
reasoning behind that thought is. I suspect it’s probably a
linguistic one. Linguistic structure suppresses those very words.
It’s those structures that I’m interested in.
‘Underground’ and ‘Ciel Tombé’
have slightly different subject matter, but essentially ‘Ciel
Tombé’ is about gravity. In 2006 Michel
Pinçon gave a talk on history and society at the
Franco-Japanese Institute in Iidabashi. I talked to him afterwards and
when I told him about my interest in the underground quarries in Paris,
it turned out that he knew someone connected to them and could put me
in touch, so it started from there.
Firstly I saw the quarries under Montparnasse Denfert, but wanted to
find somewhere a little bigger. I was then shown told that there were
bigger caverns but they had collapsed ceilings, and it was at that
point that I learned they were called ‘Ciel
Tombé’. I thought it was such a strange expression
and I asked to see more. I found out that there were some caverns under
the Bois de Vincennes, about ten of them. When I asked if there were
any more, I was told that all the others had already been repaired. The
character of this work was decided as soon as I heard the words
‘Ciel Tombé’.
How have your perceptions of Tokyo changed in those
twenty years that you have been photographing the city from tall
buildings?
For a start, the way the buildings are made has changed. So
it’s harder to take photos now. It’s hard to continue to
make that kind of work. Now, a number of skyscrapers that were planned
during Japan’s bubble years are being built. They’re still
building them. More and more finely detailed buildings are emerging in
the center of the city. The skyline of Tokyo itself has changed. Then,
with the exception of the work of some architects, some of these tall
buildings have a very administrative, managerial aura to them. The
world has come to worry more about how things are going to turn out. I
feel that’s the mood of our time.
What do you think this feeling of anxiety stems from? Is
it an anxiety about destruction of the city, for example, the
expectation of a major earthquake?
Destruction is something that Japanese people feel is close to them.
But people in Tokyo don’t think about the fact that a huge
earthquake might happen tomorrow. I’m one of a lot of people who
are optimistic and don’t really think about it. For example,
there are a lot of people who get on planes with this belief that even
if the plane crashes they will somehow be the one to survive, right? So
I don’t think many people in Japan think about earthquakes or
natural disasters. Of course, when Europeans come to Tokyo and
there’s an earthquake the next day they get a real shock, but
Japanese people feel this all the time, so they don’t have such a
sense of psychological anxiety about it. Rather it’s people that
they feel uncertain about. They are very sensitive to the anxiety they
get from others around them. I’ve felt that really strongly over
the last ten years.
How many people do you think there are who think about the Kanto
Earthquake or the firebombing?
I couldn’t say. But I think that the events of
September 11, 2001 have been instrumental in making people in
industrialized countries, which have not seen acts of war committed on
their own territories for some sixty years, realize that the city is by
no means an immutable, invincible entity. The real trauma of that day
was the loss of human life, but I think that the catastrophic
destruction of the World Trade Center also sent out a profound and
shocking message to world about the vulnerability of the built
environment. So I wondered if your work is in any way a meditation on
that vulnerability.
I’m asked that question a lot. I take the photos I want to
take and people take my subject matter to be very exaggerated or
tragic, but this subject matter is actually not such a big deal. For
example, take the ‘Blast’ series. Those photos depict
explosions, but the explosions are the product of labor that is taking
place every day. However, having photographed those explosions from
nearby, they come across as exaggerated images. I had been taking those
photos for ten years, but after 9/11 there was a change in the way
those blast images were perceived. Nobody thought of those blasts in a
negative manner until then, but people’s interpretation of them
changed after 9/11. That came as a shock to me.
Has that change in perception affected the approach you
take to making your work?
I think that event brought up huge political and cultural problems,
but as a photographer I have not thought of committing myself to those
issues in my work. So I think about those issues as an everyday person.
It’s possible that my photographs of explosions or of buildings
due for demolition are somehow a presage of the death of the city, but
I think I would be taking those photos anyway, regardless of the global
mood. I didn’t feel any compulsion after 9/11 to change my way of
thinking about my work. But that’s not to say that I was ignoring
the implications of that event. I sometimes read that some artists were
very affected by it, but that wasn’t the case for me.
How do you feel about the changes in photography over the
past couple of decades?
The quality of viewers has changed. I think that’s the biggest
thing. So I no longer make work with viewers in mind. There was a time,
when I was younger, when I thought I could achieve something that would
cater to a large number of people but I’ve had to give up on that
idea. So now I just make work that balances what I feel I want to make
with what I feel I can respect. So it’s a bit of a lonely
situation, actually.
The last decade has seen a huge proliferation in
photography. The borderline between professional and amateur
photography has been blurred and together with the surge in
international travel, the world has been very thoroughly documented in
photography. The age of the photographic explorer as a form of pioneer
is largely gone. It seemed possible to me that this past idea of
revealing a “final frontier” or hidden spaces in the world
might have played a part in making the ‘Ciel
Tombé’ series. Where do you situate art photography
in the current state of photography as a whole?
The kind of photography you’re describing is photography at
its “informative” level; its subject matter and its
presentation are implicitly informative. Of course, almost everything
has been photographed. But photography has other levels to it.
There’s the “graphic” level; there’s the
“emotional” level, and there’s also the
“intimate” level. Nobody can say that these levels of
photography have been fully explored; they just haven’t. I think
that the photographer is deeply connected to these four levels, but
it’s possible that many photographers are losing their awareness
of them.
In Tokyo the audience finds this kind of informative photography
tedious, so viewers might not be able to lose themselves in the work.
They are fairly indifferent to graphically appealing photographs, and
emotionally appealing photographs are common too, so they are not that
interested in them either. It’s only in these realms that people
can make judgments about whether a photograph is good or not. And I
don’t think that everything has been done in these realms,
either, so I think people will continue to take photographs. It’s
simply that the way photography is used in society has changed.
I’ve had some interesting reactions to my work sometimes. When
I was making this book [A Bird], someone told me they thought
these photos depicted things in this world that have never been
photographed before. Personally, I don’t think of myself as being
able to take a photo of that kind once a month; perhaps once a year or
once in every five years. But when I do manage to take a photo like
that, I feel glad to have been taking photographs for twenty years.
This is not a problem of interior space, but a question of finding some
kind of photographic pleasure in the image. So I’m really happy
when I’ve taken a new, fresh photograph, but it’s a real
problem when I can’t reuse it in my work somehow. So I
don’t think that everything has been photographed. At this level,
I really feel that not everything has been done yet.
And yet people believe that everything has been done. I’m a
little suspicious of that. It’s unclear to me why people would
think that. It may seem that way, but I don’t think it is,
although it’s hard to say for sure exactly what the state is.
Compared to the 19th Century, we’re in a completely different
level of documentation now.
As for whether I’m some kind of explorer or not, I’m not
that interested in photographers who say they take their pictures to
document interior space. “Interior space” is a concept of
the self. In Japanese, this idea of the “interior space”
has a sense of this warm, fuzzy feeling of beauty inside, whereas this
“self concept” is something you give to yourself, so
it’s self-completing. As a photographer, I don’t think it
is interesting to take that kind of thing as your theme. On top of
cultivating the interior space, I pay more attention to the exterior
world. So as much as possible I focus on the outside world. If I see
that there is something we have not yet seen or something we do not
know yet, then that’s what I want to address.
(Translation by Ashley Rawlings)
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