Photos from Tokyo and my Daughter, published by Nieves
Takashi Homma wields his camera with the exactitude of a surgeon. Tokyo’s dusky suburbs, rigid parking lots, discarded McDonald’s cups, miniscule rooftop gardens and shadowy shopping window reflections all yield to his crisp gaze. His Tokyo Children and Tokyo Teens – dubbed ‘homo transcendants’ in an essay by po-mo maverick Douglas Coupland – are placed on par with the city itself; its living embodiment, inscrutable, chilly, endlessly intriguing. Interestingly, the doe-eyed child offered up as ‘My Daughter’ in a series is not in fact Homma’s, but a friend’s – is fiction or form here stronger? Homma drains Tokyo of (real) sentiment, of all sugariness. Yet it is elbow-deep in resonance and beauty. In his later years, he works on the visual duplicity of architectural structures and intimate spaces (a stolen glimpse through a bedroom door). If he is a surgeon, his camera his machine of operation, then increasingly we detect a bedside manner.