Trace series

2012 - Photography (Photography)

Shimpei Takeda

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While still living in New York, shortly after the nuclear power plant disaster, Shimpei Takeda heard an NPR interview with a survivor living in temporary housing in Fukushima. He noticed that the dialect was similar to that of his grandparents. Straightaway he went back to Japan and turned to camera-less photographic techniques to capture otherwise unseen interactions of materials and light. Takeda recognized photographic materials as a receptor for radiation rather than visible light. By taking photographic paper on which he placed radioactive soil, an element as primal as a particle of earth, he devised a direct means of picture making in the Fukushima aftermath. His results are physical records of the catastrophe, and enigmatic in their mysterious beauty.

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Born in 1982 in Fukushima, Shimpei Takeda grew up in Chiba just outside Tokyo. The family made annual visits to grandparents in Sukagawa. The area happens to be forty miles east of the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Plant. Takeda moved to New York in 2002. A regular at such experimental music venues as Issue Project Room and Roulette, he collaborated with composers and sound artists by working with video. At the same time, he focused on a series of conceptual photographs that were based on abstract aesthetics.

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Colors:

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• radiation.n.01
• trace.n.01
• calamity.n.01
• documentation.n.01
• nuclear.a.02
• monochrome