“No matter how many photographs I take every day, the actual landscape keeps moving faster than what is in my head.” (Takashi Homma)
The Japanese word for “photograph”, shashin, comes from sha (“to reproduce or reflect”) and shin (“truth”). The act of photography, then, implies taking the truth and making a copy of it on a surface.
Gazing at the Contemporary World: Japanese Photography from the 1970s to the Present looks at documentation of Japan’s changing social and geographic landscapes over the last four decades, through the gaze of twenty-three internationally renowned photographers including Nobuyoshi Araki, Shomei Tomatsu, Daido Moriyama and Takashi Homma.
Curated by Rei Masuda (Chief Curator of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo), the exhibition is divided into two sections: ‘A Changing Society’, focusing on figures, and ‘Changing Landscapes’, looking at urban, suburban, rural and natural terrains.
Masuda says that it starts in 1968 because that was a year that marked several turning points in Japanese photography. While the student riots were generally shaking things up around the world, the landmark exhibition 100 Years of Photography: History of Photographic Expression in Japan took place, the photography magazine Provoke was founded, and the konpora sashin or ‘contemporary photography’ school emerged with a focus on documenting ordinary or insignificant everyday scenes.
Since ’68 Japan has seen the bubble economy and the effects of its dramatic burst, the rise of a hyper-consumer culture, the information revolution, the devastation of the Kobe earthquake, the exponential increase of population in urban areas and the loss of traditional communities – all of which can be found in these “reproductions of the truth.”
Having traveled to Lithuania, Germany, Uzbekistan, Italy, Egypt, Latvia, Jordan, Papua New Guinea and Indonesia, the collection of 76 images will be at Sydney’s Japan Foundation Gallery from 22 February – 4 March.
Takashi Homma is Sydney = awesome. Can’t wait for this.
Comment by Mike — February 21, 2010 @ 4:42 pmthese pics are fantastic….thank you for sharing.
Comment by Liana — February 26, 2010 @ 4:46 pm