PHOTO:Naoya Hatakeyama-Underground/Water

Since the ‘80s, the Japanese photographer Naoya Hatakeyama has been developing a body of work mainly focused on an architectural and landscaped vision of Nature, influenced by his interest in science and archaeology of the city. Naoya Hatakeyama is not just another landscape photographer. In fact, upon understanding the impetus for his dramatic large-scale color photographs, one could even say that landscape itself only plays a small role in his work.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Taka Ishii Gallery Archive

After observing that “The quarries and the cities are like negative and positive images of a single photograph”,  Naoya Hatakeyama began to investigate urban centers built from limestone and concrete. In “Underground” (1999), he explored the pitch-black depths of Tokyo’s underbelly from the tunnels of the Shibuya River, revealing the ecosystems of the city’s sewer network that often go unseen. Nearly a decade later he returned to the subject, photographing the remnants of decaying limestone quarries underneath Paris in “Ciel Tombé” (2007). Now the artist exhibits his series “Underground / Water”, at the Taka Ishii Gallery Photography Paris. In this series, Naoya Hatakeyama further develops a photographic approach he initiated a few years earlier, on the city of Tokyo. In a panorama of square format photos, this work presents the polluted, stagnant waters of the city sewers. Organic waste and various iron particles give wastewater an amalgamation of shapes and colors. Lit for the first time under the photographer’s torchlight, it emerges from its usual shroud of darkness. Hatakeyama’s understanding of cities is not, for the most part, a sociological view but based rather on architectural layers (which are typically always devoid of people). His camera patiently traces these layers, unifying the visual structure of the city and the usually invisible spheres above and below.

Info: Taka Ishii Gallery Photography Paris, 119 rue Vieille du Temple, Paris, Duration: 10/3-23/4/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 12:00-`19:00, www.takaishiigallery.com