2011.4.4 Kesen-cho

- Photography (Photography)

Naoya Hatakeyama

location: Iwate, Nihon
year born: 1958
gender: male
nationality: Japanese

Naoya Hatakeyama’s series Rikuzentakata (2011) documents the devastating aftermath of the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Throughout the series of sixty C-prints, Hatakeyama’s photographs depict scenes of torn landscapes and leveled homes, demolished villages and massive piles of detritus pummeled beyond recognition. The images serve as records of disaster, seemingly driven by an intense need to bear witness to collective trauma. Hatakeyama’s photographs, however, emerged from a painful and personal grief: the series focuses on the near-destruction of the artist’s hometown, an event which resulted in both his mother’s death and the deaths of many friends and neighbors. Rikuzentakata bears the ethical weight and responsibility of photojournalism even as its genesis comes out of a deeply felt loss and the ambiguity of survivor’s guilt. Hatakeyama suggests that what’s lost can never be fully recovered, but that with time, those wounds can slowly heal and life can begin again.


Naoya Hatakeyama is one of Japan’s leading contemporary photographers. His work frequently explores the relationship between natural and built environments, and he is particularly invested in examining how urbanization produces violent effects in surrounding landscapes. In 2012, Hatakeyama was the subject of a mid-career retrospective at SFMOMA titled Naoya Hatakeyama: Natural Stories, an exhibition of large-scale photographs centered around themes of nature, destruction, and human will. His photographs have been acquired by many international collections such as the National Museum of Modern Art, Osaka; the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo; Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven; the Swiss Foundation for Photography, Winterthur; la Maison Européenne de la Photographie, Paris; and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.


Colors:



Walking Through
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Koki Tanaka

2009

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A poem written by 5 poets at once (first attempt)
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Koki Tanaka

2013

This artwork was part of a group of projects presented in the Japanese Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2013...

Edinburgh Castle on the Bin Bag
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Takahiro Iwasaki

2008

Edinburgh Castle on the Bin Bag features a model of the Edinburgh castle constructed by using shiny black cards placed on top of an open, full black plastic trash bag...

Ho! Ho! Ho! Merry Christmas: Battle of Easel Point - Memorial Project Okinawa
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Jun Nguyen-Hatsushiba

2003

Filmed underwater, this is the third video in Nguyen-Hatsushiba’s “Memorial Project” series which began in 2001...

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Japanese House Series
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Tomoko Yoneda

2010

Yoneda’s Japanese House (2010) series of photographs depicts buildings constructed in Taiwan during the period of Japanese occupation, between 1895 and 1945...

Walking Through
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Koki Tanaka

2009

Walking Through is one of a series of videos—sometimes humorous, often absurd—that record the artist’s performative interactions with objects in a particular site...

Hako
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Hiraki Sawa

2006

Hako (2006) depicts a mysterious and dystopic landscape where the world becomes flat: distance between different spaces, depth of field and three-dimensional perceptions are canceled...

Process of Blowing Flour
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Koki Tanaka

2010

Tanaka’s unique understanding of objects and materials is reflected in the four photographs that document his Process of Blowing Flour ...

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2012.3.24 Kesen-cho
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Japanese House Series
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Tomoko Yoneda

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Yoneda’s Japanese House (2010) series of photographs depicts buildings constructed in Taiwan during the period of Japanese occupation, between 1895 and 1945...

Walking Through
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Process of Blowing Flour
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Five-Hundred Twenty-Four
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Five Hundred Twenty-Four, a single-channel video installation by Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis, features singers from over twenty Cleveland-area choirs counting numbers in an iterative process: one person sings “one”, then two people sing “two”, and so forth, to 524...

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2012.3.24 Kesen-cho
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2011.5.1 Yonesaki-cho
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2013.10.20 Kesen-cho
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2012.11.4 Takata-cho
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Mémoire promise #3
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2016

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