For this blog I am going to talk about a photographer that I did a profile on for my photography class this past week. He is a Japanese born artist that started capturing the essence of Japanese culture and exposing the injustices going on. Takashi was born in Tokyo, Japan 1962 and attended the Nihon University College of Art to study photography for a few years. Before graduating however, he dropped out to take an internship in London for i-D Magazine. He really blossomed however in 1998 when he released his breakthrough collection titled, Tokyo Suburbia. In this collection, he worked to capture modern suburban towns outside of Tokyo where he noticed the growing trend toward westernization. This included the growing abundance of fast food restaurants (and subsequently liter) that began to transform his native home. Takashi also worked to capture the faces of Japan’s young adults. He knew that this upcoming generation had the choice of whether or not Tokyo was going to stay on the path towards westernization or if they were going to work to reachieved their traditional roots. He was awarded the Kimura Ihei Commemorative Photography Award in 1999 for this collection.
His next big collection was titled, Tokyo and My Daughter, which featured photos from 1999-2010. And strangely enough, the photos of the little girl were not actually his daughter, nor were they always the same girl. His overall goal of this collection was to intertwine images of an aging girl, from the age of an infant to an adolescent, with images of Tokyo’s changing landscape. He wanted to show his viewers how quickly, in just 11 years, a city could change– just in the time a kid left childhood.
My favorite work he has done however is his collection called, New Waves. This piece wasn’t taken in Japan, but of the northern cost of Oahu, Hawaii. He wanted to show a contrasting landscape than one that was always changing. He was intrigued by the unchanging beach and ocean. For 13 years from 2000-2013 he returned to Oahu and captured his subject. The beach was so static in its development that the entire collection looked as though they could have been taken over the course of a day, not 13 years. Additionally, the photos were taken with a slow shutter speed, not to capture clarity, but to almost transform his photos into an oil panting or a water color. The waves are smoothed out and any of the figures seen could have easily been painted with a simple brush stroke.
Finally, his last work that I researched, Mushrooms From The Forest (2011), was taken shortly after the tsunami and earthquake that caused the Fukushima meltdown. The forests and towns surrounding the power plant were plagued with radiation and the mushrooms especially were condemned for toxic amounts. Takashi was fascinated in how human creation so easily could destroy the delicate nature of the island.
If you click on this link–> Takashi_Homma-1 you can view some of his images in my power point presentation.