L’écriture est précisément cet acte qui unit dans le même travail ce qui ne pourrait être saisi ensemble dans le seul espace plat de la représentation. (1)
Roland Barthes
Through this book, Takashi Homma accompanies us along the lines of a suspended territory in which a slow to continue by signs holds us in an enchanted oscillation between the depth of a silent-delicate observation, and the disturbing noise as it is gradually revealed.
By means of a conscious gestation of optical penetration, Takashi Homma drags with him in a placid recording of the traces of blood left by the deer killed in the Shiretoko National Park on the Japanese island of Hokkaido, where following a controversial environmental policy the government has decided to encourage hunters and local farming communities to be personally concerned with defending their crops and reducing the ever-increasing number of deer on the island.
The images to which Takashi Homma asks us to bring attention are presented as a collection of moments-movement along a dark path, in which the snowy landscape immersed in the deep mountains, the traces of the blood of the hunt, each element is named and found according to a perspective that does not exhaust the experience of the image itself but of this brings it back to the eye, the impression.
By teaching us lower breathing, with this work, the author introduces us to a register of the gaze that from the subject itself proposes to the observer a postural discovery capable of problematizing the act of seeing.
This book from 2009 finds the author far from suburban landscapes and portraits of teenagers for whom he became famous in the 1990s.
Takashi Homma is a Japanese photographer among the best known and celebrated. After having worked in London as a commercial photographer for some important international magazines, since the Nineties, he increasingly focuses on territorial analysis, first performed in Japan and then all over the world, and on the analysis of the same photographic language he uses. He was the protagonist of a major retrospective exhibition at the 21st Century Museum in Kanazawa and the Tokyo City Opera Art Gallery. In 2014 he starts the project The Narcissistic City, published in April 2016 by the English publisher Mack Books and focused on the analysis of the most representative and iconic buildings of numerous cities.
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publisher: MACK
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review by: Matteo Cremonesi
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copyright © Takashi Homma and PHROOM, all rights reserved
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(1) L’empire des signes (1970), Roland Barthes, éd. Flammarion, coll. « Champs », 1980, p. 22