Takashi Homma
The Narcissistic City
What kind of gaze does the city license? What kind of gaze does it induce, determine, inform, program, organise? What is the nature of the city as reality, as image and as symbol? What is this object of desire, at once near and ungraspable, fascinating and repulsive, attractive and intractable, necessary and unbearable, intimate and impenetrable, available and inaccessible, that it is for itself as well as for the man of the crowd, for the man in the street, for the man of the city, for those who inhabit it and those merely passing through it, for anyone who knows that it is a labyrinth but nonetheless allows himself to remain trapped in it?
Hubert Damisch
Takashi Homma uses fragments collected in camera obscura constructed in metropolitan areas of Japan and the US to build a city image by image. Homma does not seek to index any particular city but to render a shadow world, a city's unconscious caught in a dark chamber, suspended in the camera’s box. The camera obscura offers a repetition, like the reflection shimmering in Narcissus’s pool. The narcissistic city is a city transfixed upon its own image – a mirror city, laced with repetition (modular) and reflections (glass). A city looking at its reflection, a city caught in a dark chamber, a city observing its camera obscura inversion – flickering inside the camera’s box.

女優・市川実日子のデビューから現在までを撮り続けてきたホンマタカシ。膨大な数の写真から厳選し再構成した作品を通して、彼女の20年間を「ポートレイト」する写真集。

Since the advent of photography, certain cities have become inextricably intertwined with their depiction by great photographers: Eugene Atget in turn-of-the-century Paris; Berenice Abbott in 1930s New York; Ed Ruscha in late-60s Los Angeles. While Daido Moriyama documented the disaffection and dissipation of postwar Tokyo, Takashi Homma picks up the baton with a contemporary portrait of the modern-day metropolis that is both cinematic and complex. For over a decade, Homma has turned the neutral gaze of his lens toward Tokyo's suburban environs and urban center. As in all of his work, Homma's vision of Tokyo navigates a finely nuanced line between sterility and sentimentality, detachment and lusciousness, presenting a sleek, contemporary vision of a postmodern megalopolis populated by a new generation of video game aficionados and fashionistas. While Homma has published extensively inside his native Japan, this is his first volume published for an international audience. "Takashi Homma: Tokyo" compiles selections from each of the artist's six previously-published titles on the city, including "Tokyo Suburbia," his seminal work now considered a contemporary classic.