The first time I saw Naoya Hatakeyama's work was 2001 in the basement of the Japanese pavillon at the Biennale in Venice, He was one of the artists representing Japan. The pieces had a amazing level of energy. The Japanese pavillon had two levels entitled "fast" and "slow" and the photography was put in such flawless context with the architecture that one could have thought that at least the downstairs (slow) of the pavillon was built to accomodate the works. The pieces displayed in Venice were from Hatakeyama's Underground series (1999)in the lower part, and in the "fast" area the Untitled (1989-97), 70 C-prints on aluminum (Portraits of a city) and Untitled/Osaka, ( an amazing Diptych (one, two) 1998-99.
Vincent Borrelli, one of my really favorite art book dealers and a photographer who had his pieces shown at the MoMA, among other places, has later sent me a very fascinating book with the title:"Naoya Hatakeyama". It is a signed copy, and Naoya signed it in Nürnberg, Germany, on July 24th 2002, which was a cloudy day, or at least this is what the signature says.
The book is a really fascinating one to own, as it not only contains representative pieces of some of Hatakeyama's photographic series, but also little text fragments putting the work in a very interesting context.
One of the main series in Hatakeyama's work are the portraits of Limestone quarries, of really breathtaking images of industrial architecture and landscape. Here is what Hatakeyama writes as an introduction to the "Lime Works" chapter of the book:
...When I learned that Japan was a land of limestone, my appreciation of its cityscape underwent a subtle change. Japan is dependent on imports for most of the minerals it uses, but when it comes to limestone it is totally self-sufficient. Every year some two hundred million tons of limestone are cut from the quarries scattered about the country, half being used to make cement and the rest entering our lives in such forms as iron, glass, paper, ink, plastic, medicines, or foodstuffs... IN the texture of concrete I can feel the trace of corals and fusulinas that inhibited warm equatorial seas two hundred to four hundred million years ago...
If the concrete buildings and highways that stretch to the horizon are all made of limestone dug from the hills are all made of limestone dug from the hills, and if they should all be ground to dust and this vast quantity of calcium carbonate returned to its precise points of origin, why then, with the last spoonful, the ridge lines of the hills would be restored to their original dimensions. The quarries and the cities are like negative and positive images of a single photograph... (Naoya Hatakeyama)
A true poet who takes photographs to illustrate his profound observations.
I saw more of Hatakeyama's work in Miami, during the Art Basel, Miami Beach. Lothar Albrecht, the intelligent gallery owner from Frankfurt am Main represents Hatakeyama in Europe and actually most of the world. LA Gallery was offering some of the last pieces still available for sale from the river series. Hatakeyama took pictures of a river that runs straight through Tokyo. The river is now very much a concrete channel, but Hatakeyama made the series of the images from the river so beautiful that what might appear as a flaw is suddenly another piece of visual poetry. The camera in all of the shots is placed precisely on the line where the artificial river bank has been placed. The artist cuts our field of vision in half. There is a river world below and a human world above the equator of the photograph. This effect is even amplified when there are several of the images hanging next to each other. Hatakeyama's Tokyo gallery, the really excellent Take Ishii Gallery had nine of the larger versions of the river series images next to each other and it was an incredibly radiant display.
The shots are taken from various angles at various times of the day and night, yet their visual impact is first contained, almost like the river itself and then multiplied by the series.
Lothar Albrecht also showed some of the "Slow Glass" photographs by Hatakeyama, pictures he created while he was the resident artist in < a href="http://www.miltonkeynes.co.uk/ UK" target="_blank">Milton Keynes UK. He shot photographs of places in and around the city through the wet windows of his car. The images appear to be out of focus at first. The interested viewer can discover that the focus is not on the big picture, but on the images created by the drops of water on the glass, acting as lenses. An incredible perspective. The series is called "Slow Glass" as its idea is based on the concept of a material with the same name invented by the British author Bob Shaw. Slow Glass would permit to look through it and see events and moments it "remembered".
While in Milton Keynes, the photographer also created a large series of portraits of the location itself. I think the complete installation contains 49 photographs of residential areas in the city. The images oddly enough look as if they were not of actual residences but of to scale models of the same. Hatakeyama used a simple technique he describes in the book to achieve this effect. The car used to make the slow-glass pictures was involved again and a intelligently placed tripod, allowing us to feel like giants in a foreign and yet oddly familiar place.
Hatakeyama's sense of detail is incredibly refined and it appears that his ability to create exceptionally intelligent work is growing as he progresses in his career. There are only a few publications available about his work, the main being "Naoya Hatakeyama". Other books are a bit more rare. There is "Lime Works", and a few other titles available via photoeye.com.
Hatakeyama is one of the most important Japanese photographers of this generation. And yet much of the work by this artist seems still relatively affordable. Will this change once he will find a Gallery in the United States, or will it just happen, as more and more people discover his work?
I feel really lucky to have discovered the work of Naoya Hatakeyama, as it is a true source of inspiration and an encouraging hint, that subtle and intelligent art will continue to exist.
