Naoya Hatakeyama: Journey through the residual world

Naoya Hatakeyama 畠山 直哉, from the Blast series, 1995

I arrive early for my interview with Naoya Hatakeyama. Punctuality is one thing in Japan, but arriving early, similar to being late, is an imposition; so I opt to simply linger along the concrete promenade adjoining the Shinkawa River. I sit on a bench. It is mid summer, my shirt clings to my back. Cicadas sing. Joyous. This bounded profusion. Having grown up and lived much of my adult life in South Africa, the ordered symmetry of the Japanese landscape has always impressed me greatly, particularly the greying tones in which the country has so willingly cloaked itself. Order and abundance, wildness and constraint.

It was while living in the rural backwater of Tokushima that I first encountered Mr. Hatakeyama’s photographs, images that quietly confront viewers with the complex beauty and unavoidable character of our modern existence, images that make strange the mundane: mountains excavated for their lime deposits, rivers notable only for their perfect symmetry and sameness, blast sites, machinery, the intractable mystery of the underworld. More than simply make strange the mundane edifices of Japan’s consumptive progress, Mr. Hatakeyama’s photographs impressed upon me a different way of looking at how progress is measured in a photograph.

Having palpably been influenced by Mr. Hatakeyama’s worldview, it is not surprising then that I wanted to meet him. On my four-year journey to achieve this simple ambition I was afforded much time, to sweeten my appreciation, which is how I came across Edward Burtynsky. Like Mr. Hatakeyama, this Canadian landscape photographer also photographs from a viewpoint that is “anthropological rather than critical”, to quote John Brinckerhoff Jackson, the father of cultural landscape studies.

And like Mr. Hatakeyama, Mr. Burtynsky is articulate in describing his interest in the theme of ruined modern landscapes. “I remember the first time I came to Toronto alone,” Mr. Burtynsky once tellingly digressed during an interview. “I found myself looking up at skyscrapers sixty and seventy stories high. I was bowled over by the scale at which we operate, the kinds of things we can create.” Looking at these edifices Mr. Burtynsky realized that for things to be on this scale, “there has to be something equally monumental in the landscape where we have taken all this material from. I felt that Newtonian law implied a reciprocal action in nature – a hole in the ground that meets the scale of the rising of the skyscraper – and my task was to go in search of the evidence of that reciprocal action, to see what the residual world looked like.”

Mr. Hatakeyama’s photographs are very much concerned with this residual world; a world sometimes obvious in its photographic exegesis yet implacably sly in delivering neatly encapsulated meanings. His photographs are not simply images of Japan’s ruined splendor, or mere activist refrains. I realize this when I finally meet with the photographer, who arrives at the gallery on a battered off-road motorcycle. More so than his habit of vigorously scratching the underside of his chin when I propose a difficult question, I am most charmed by Mr. Hatakeyama’s redoubtable grin. He is not a somber man. Indeed, as Mr. Hatakeyama guides me through his photographic landscapes, I am struck by his remarkable thoughtfulness and levity. His elegant pathos.

The following interview was conducted on July 21, 2004 at the Taka Ishii Gallery.

Youth and Early Influences

Born in provincial town of Rikuzentakata, in Iwate Prefecture, Mr. Hatakeyama recalls the “vast empty space in front of our house”, which overlooked the Kesenagawa River. “I was always looking at the emptiness,” he says. “My favorite place, though, was near the a train tunnel. It had this huge cutting that was covered in concrete. I was about five when I discovered it.” Fourteen years later, in 1977, he entered Tsukuba University’s School of Art and Design.

How did your interest in photography begin?

I met Kiyoji Otsuji, a professor of photography, at Tsukuba University in 1978. Before that I had no interest in photography. Meeting him was really inspiring, particularly hearing what he had to say about the art of photography. It is quite difficult to express how great he was. [Pauses] Do you know much about the circumstance and atmosphere of Japanese art schools at the time?

No.

In 1977 Japanese art schools offered many courses, including painting and sculpture. Many of the teachers were very conservative and advocated the salon style of teaching art. I found it very boring. Mr. Otsuji, however, was fantastic. He knew a lot about avant-garde art in the twentieth century. He was a member of Jikken Kobo (Experimental Workshop), an art movement founded by a number of artists after the war, which included the sculptor and video artist Katsuhiro Yamaguchi and composer Toru Takemitsu. The group’s theoretical axis was Shuzo Takiguchi, a very famous poet who died in 1979. Mr. Takiguchi was personally very close to the French Surrealists and Dadaists, men such as Andre Breton and Marcel Duchamp. Everyone in the Jikken Kobo coalesced around Takiguchi. He had a great influence on many people, including Mr. Otsuji. It was very exciting to listen to him speak. Mr. Otsuji would often talk about photographers such as Eugene Atget, the great documenter of Paris life.

How would you say Mr. Otsuji’s teachings influenced your first body of work, Contour Lines?

Do you know the work of Takuma Nakahira? Along with the philosopher and critic Koji Taki, he co-founded the photography quarterly Provoke, in 1968. During the 1970s Mr. Nakahira wrote many important essays, which I thought were good. He had a fantastic sense for words and writing. I particularly liked his collection of essays, titled Why an Illustrated Botanical Dictionary? (1973). In it, Mr. Nakahira renounced all his previous lyrical works, and declared his aim to create materialist photographs in the form of an album or pictorial compendium. He even burned all of his negatives. His position was in many senses typical of 1970s thought, which doubted the subject. You can create something, but is it true. Mr. Nakahira’s essays were very important in relation to this.

To answer your question, though, Contour Lines represented an attempt to avoid any explanatory elements in my photographs. Very often when we take pictures, we do it to express something to someone, to tell them something, as in press, advertising and family photographs. We are all used to seeing these kinds of images. Following on Mr. Otsuji’s advice, I removed all explanatory elements from my images. Admittedly, this style of looking that has become very popular in photography nowadays.

In 1984 you moved to Tokyo. I read that you were overwhelmed by the city? Has this sense changed?

I’m still overwhelmed by this place. [Laughs] I hate this city. After completing my postgraduate studies at Tsukuba University in 1984, I worked for the Seibu Group. I had a part-time job with them for one year. I was a salaryman. But, during this time, I also directed a video documentary on the German artist Joseph Beuys, who was visiting Japan. About a year later, I started photographing Japan’s limestone quarries.

Lime Works

Limestone is one of the few natural resources in which Japan is totally self-sufficient. A sedimentary rock comprised mainly of calcium carbonate, limestone is an essential ingredient in the production of cement. It is also used as an aggregate for asphalt, iron, and glass, even medicine. Every year over 200 million tons of limestone is extracted from various sites across the country. Photographed over eight years, between 1986 and 1994, at 30 sites from Hokkaido to Okinawa, Lime Works (1996) presents an instructive document of Japan’s limestone industry. With scientific detachment, Mr. Hatakeyama pictures everything from the ducts and conveyor belts of huge lime processing factories, to vast, opencast quarries and concentrically mined hills. Amidst the splendor of these industrial landscapes, none of which are named or captioned, Mr. Hatakeyama sneaks in a picture of a bird’s nest. It contains two, chocolate brown speckled eggs.

Where did your interest in photographing these lime quarries derive from?

I suppose in high school, in 1975, when I painted the local lime works. I also took my first photograph in Iwate, in my hometown. I simply went to the nearby quarry and rattled the gate. The people who worked there were very kind and welcoming. They allowed me to photograph as I pleased. Although I didn’t talk much with the men who worked there, I did, however, find out that there was an office in Tokyo that possessed a lot of information on limestone quarries. After visiting this office I made a pilgrimage to as many of the quarries as possible.

Did you ever doubt your commitment to the project?

[Laughs] It took me eight years to complete this project, which should answer your question.

The images in the book strike me as remarkably declaratory, or explanatory, to borrow a word you mentioned earlier. Were they meant to be explanatory given what you had been taught?

You’re right; they are explanatory. When I started this work, many friends were dismayed and stopped speaking to me. They felt that this way of imaging was too literal. They loved Contour Lines but thought this was just so different. But it was this project that made me realize the city I was living in was not separated from the countryside. As I wrote in the introduction to the book, we live in cities that have tossed away the sea, the mountains, the rivers, yet receive their fruits for our consumption through a vast distribution system. Nature is already so distant from us that you might say it has become a fantasy.

Your comment cues with a question I want to ask about the political subtext of your work. In a recent interview, the photographer Michael Light stated: “In my opinion, serious contemporary artistic production dealing with landscape must deal with politics and violence in some way, whether explicit or implied. Otherwise its just fluff, decoration for those wanting false comfort and a delusionary ahistorical and apolitical world” Would you say that, in the context of contemporary Japan, that your is political?

No, no, no. But, landscape images can be political when people demand only beauty. That is when landscape becomes political. Generally speaking, traditional landscape photography has a tendency to make people stop thinking about political issues. I don’t personally think the events shown in these images, the destruction of beautiful mountain landscapes, is bad. I don’t think that specific action is bad.

Those people who protest or feel outraged by these works, people who want to preserve beautiful landscapes, are victims of aestheticism. They are living in the tradition of the romantic landscape. In my introduction, I speak of this as the desire, quite unrelated to our lives in the city, for a healthy ecological system. It is a desire that is gradually developing into an obsession, while its object recedes even farther into the distance.

This seems like quite a provocative statement, can you elaborate a bit more on what you mean?

I can understand that this is a big issue. Let me explain it this way. When I go to Europe, for instance, I see many beautiful fields. They look like soft pieces of cloth. But you have to remember that those fields have been cultivated over centuries, by humans. Before the fields there was a large forest. Yet when we look at images depicting those fields we see nature, not a cultured nature. I think the romantic, or aesthetic way of viewing what is nature constitutes a different thing entirely from what it means to conserve or preserve nature. However, many people confuse these two issues.

I am interested in understanding your intention in this work. The Hungarian-born photographer Brassai (born Gyula Halasz) openly argued that the camera is a crudely fashioned sociological tool. “It is not sociologists who provide insights,” Brassai remarked, “but photographers of our sort who are observers at the very centre of their time.” Would you agree?

I don’t think many photographers look at themselves as sociologists, although I suppose they can do sociological work with their cameras. It is probably better to say that sociologists find things that interest them in photographs. But, I must add that if more photographers possessed the consciousness of sociologists, the world of photography would be much better.

Nocturnes

The book Underground (2000) is a collection of photographs of Tokyo’s underground culverts, and takes as its subject the abstracted beauty of an atrophied urban environment. The character of the work, while highly original, has precedents in the work of Shomei Tomatsu, specifically his images Aftermath of a Typhoon, Nagoya (1959) and Asphalt, Tokyo (1961), from his book Nippon (1967). Underground won the photographer the 16th Annual Higashikawa Prize for Domestic Photography, in 2000, as well as the 42nd Mainichi Award for Art, in 2001.

I know your decision to explore the underground recesses of Shibuya was prompted by a particular image in your River Series, from 1993-4, which showed a large, gaping blackness. How did it feel heading into that nothingness?

Creepy. [Laughs] I entered all by myself. But I must correct you somewhat. Have you ever visited the catacombs in Paris? It is located at the edge of an underground quarry. Basically Paris was built from stone quarried beneath the surface of the city. This fascinated me when I first found out, as it seemed to mirror my idea that quarries and cities are like negative and positive images of a single photograph.

The Paris catacombs, however, exhausted me, the large number of tourists and human bones. [Laughs] While I was experiencing this in Paris, it struck me that Tokyo had similar underground spaces, which I recalled from the photograph you mention. Two days after returning from Paris I visited Shibuya’s underground culverts.

Can you speak a bit about the process?

I worked for almost a year of this series. The photos of the illuminated tunnels were taken last, right at the end of the project. For the first ten months of the project I took detailed images of the surfaces of the water underground, as well as the animals that inhabit it. While I was doing this, I suddenly realized that, despite the incredible colors and form of the images, there was no explanation as to where I was. It was then that I thought to photograph the interior spaces as a whole.

Shibuya is such a notoriously busy place. Did you ever meet anybody underground?

Never. You must remember that these are natural riverbeds that have been covered over. It is not habitable like the railway tunnels in New York. About 50 years ago there was open sky above these rivers. If you look carefully at image of one particular tunnel, you can see the remains of an old bridge. The city needed more land, so they covered over the river.

You said friends stopped speaking to you after Lime Works. Did they at least start speaking to you again after Underground?

No, but after this series I made many new friends. [Laughs] I’m okay.

Venice

In the summer of 2001, Mr. Hatakeyama was invited to represent Japan in its pavilion at the 49th Venice biennale. He showed an unusual pair of images, aerial views of an Osaka baseball stadium. In the one image it has been retrofitted with domestic housing elements and a parking space, on what would have been the pitch. In the latter, it is being demolished in its entirety. The work claims a lineage with an earlier series of Tokyo aerial views, started in 1989.

What was it like exhibiting in Venice?

A wonderful thing happened to me at the opening of my exhibition. Just before the opening, at the press reception, the curator asked how she should introduce me. As an artist, or a photographer? I told her to simply introduce me as a photographer. She duly did. ‘This is Mr. Hatakeyama, a photographer,’ she said. Afterwards, the journalists asked, ‘Where is the artist?’ It seems that most people consider photographers to be photojournalist – with the Nikon slung around their neck.

The debate does tend to get heated over whether photography is art. What are your thoughts?

I think it is an interesting debate. Over the past twenty years art has changed. It was once almost impossible to think of Henri Cartier-Bresson as a great artist. Twenty years ago, a good photographer was simply a good photographer, not an artist. But then, twenty years ago, sociological research wasn’t art, which it can now sometimes be.

Slow Glass

In 2001, Mr. Hatakeyama was a resident artist, on the Light Xchange, in Milton Keynes, England. Aside from photographing his host nation’s distinctive suburban landscape, he also produced a new body of work, titled Slow Glass, images of half-discernable landscapes photographed from behind rain-soaked glass. The abstract pattern of these images, as well as their interest in repetition hint at an earlier project, titled Maquettes/ Light, from 1995-8, which pictured the geometric order of Tokyo’s high-rise apartment blocks, their night-time corridors lit in precise rows.

What attracted you to do a suburban study?

Milton Keynes is such a funny place. In Tokyo suburbia, there is still quite a lot of diversity. There are at least shops – and pachinko parlors. In Milton Keynes, however, there are only houses. Everything looks completely the same but always slightly different. It’s crazy. People want to live their lives in certain specific contexts but they don’t want to be the same as other people. They want to be different, but only slightly. This intrigued me.

Contemporaries and Future Work

Few of your works show people. Do you find it difficult to photograph human subjects?

Well, sometimes photographs of people, portraits, make me very sad, very tired, exhausted. I hate that feeling, so I don’t want to repeat it. I appreciate that some people have no interest in architectural and landscape photography, and prefer portraits. Personally, though, portraits make me sad because people in photographs look dead.
But bear in mind that I work in very isolated places with few people. [Chuckling, he picks up a copy of Lime Works and points out a miniscule figure in one of his images.]

As a matter of interest, do you own photographs by any other photographers?

Yes, I have one print by the American photographer Gary Winogrand, his famous image of the elephant nose. Recently, I also bought an image by the Los Angeles-based photographic artist James Welling.

Speaking of architectural photography, what about Lewis Balz?

Lewis Balz is cool. He was always cool, always apocalyptic, always conceptually interesting and extreme, which is why he is still alive.

What about Japanese photographers?

I love Toshio Shibata’s work. Remember that place by the train tunnel I was telling you about, when I first saw Mr. Shibata’s photographs, I said ‘Aaah! That is my place.’ I also admire Hiroshi Sugimoto, the expatriate Japanese artist and photographer based in New York. Sugimoto is a very special artist. I have never known an artist before who is also an architect. He built a shrine on an island two years ago. His photography extends beyond photography.

Last question, what new projects are you working on?

The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), in Montreal, has commissioned me to make black and white photographs on the subject of architectural photography. This is not about photographing architecture, but rather photographs about architectural photographs. The CCA has an extensive collection of architectural photographs, around 20 thousand items dating from the 1800s. They asked me to revive their collection; I have to create new works inspired by the old works in their collection. I am also working on a project in the Swiss Alps, and also completing a series of photographs of a museum on Naoshima Island, designed by the architect Tadao Ando. Lime Works took me eight years, but this year alone I have plans to release three books.

Thank you to Tomoko Fujibayashi of the Taka Ishii Gallery for her invaluable assistance.

(This article originally appeared in a 2005 edition of the Kyoto Journal, one of my favourite magazines. It introduced me to Donald Richie and Pico Iyer. Thank you John and Ken.)