2011.5.1 Yonesaki-cho

Naoya Hatakeyama

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 (five of which are included in the Kadist Art Foundation’s collection), 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. It is difficult to view the flood-submerged house in 2011.5.1 Yonesaki-cho (2011), for example, without drawing associations with destroyed domestic spaces and dystopian metaphors of a “drowned world.”

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.