TARO NASU is pleased to present Pinhole Revolution / Architecture, by Takashi Homma. This is his first solo exhibition with the gallery.

Takashi Homma
1962 Born in Tokyo
1999 24th Kimura Ihei Memorial Photography Award
Lives and works in Tokyo

Takashi Homma is known that he depicts each object from which the context and the background are cut away. Homma always tells us that photography is no way “depicts true reality”. For him, photography is nothing more and nothing less than that which mechanically cuts out physical traces of the light. Without special technique or dramatic effects, he shows them just simply as it is, with a characteristic sense of distance between the photographer and the object. In his works Homma reveals the nature of photography as a “cutout scenery”．

In the first solo exhibition with TARO NASU, Homma presents two series of photographs, ‘Architectural Landscapes’ and his latest series, ‘Pinhole’, which he just started in this year as a new way of expression.

‘Architectural Landscapes’
Homma has photographed well-known architects, not as architectural structures but just as landscapes, making them free from their identities and forms. In his photographs, architecture works as kind of window (= frame) open to the world. For Homma, ‘Architectural Landscapes’ indicate the landscapes you see through these ‘frames’. These images are cut out in several ways; cut out by the architects that work as a framing in photography, and by photographed in this way, they are also cut out from the context in which the architecture itself has captured.

‘Pinhole’
On the other hand, the photography with pinhole camera doesn’t have the process of neither focusing nor framing. Furthermore, the artist’s subjectivity never cannot be reflected. The rays of light, collected through a tiny pinhole less than 1 mm, are softly focused to make an image on a printing paper, depicting every object equally regardless of its distance, spending a long exposure time.

Both of these works are Homma’s trial to remove the independence both of the objects and the photographer as much as possible, tying to show it as it is. There is an antinomy that the “lack of independence” is the main factor that characterizes Homma’s unique photographic world. By making the objects anonymous, Homma leaves some room to viewers, allowing them to give free meanings to the images. In other words, Homma assuredly sets a ‘trap’ for the appreciators to be captured in their own subjectivity.
These series of works always stay as they are, throwing an essential question; “What the photograph is”.

Special exhibition : taimatz Pinhole Camera Project
taimatz, a project space next to TARO NASU, will present a collaborative exhibition. Takashi Homma will convert the space of taimatz into a pinhole camera, and will exhibit photographies taken by “taimatz” as a camera.