Signed; Naoya Hatakeyama - Scales - 2007

Exceptionally signed copy on the title page by Naoya Hatakeyama (born 1958), unique and unavailable as a signed copy online. 64 pages including 4 fold-out pages and 22 black-and-white and color photographs, texts in English by Naoya Hatakeyama and essays by Hubertus von Amelunxen and Louise Désy. Sturdy hardcover with a mounted photograph on the cover. Very good condition.

Published by the prestigious American Nazraeli Press Scale and exhibited at the Centre Canadien d'Architecture (CCA) in Montreal. The project explores the relationship between reality and its representation in architectural maquettes, playing with illusions of scale and perspective. The books and the exhibition are divided into three main series:
• New York / Tobu World Square (2003–2004): Black-and-white photographs framing a model as if the photographer were really walking the streets of New York.
• New York / Window of the World (2006): Color, geometric images of a model located in an amusement park in Shenzhen, China.
• Tokyo / Mori Building (2003): Panoramas simulating aerial views of Tokyo, presenting the city as an infinite accumulation of infrastructures.

Naoya Hatakeyama, regarded as one of the most important contemporary Japanese photographers, lives and works in Tokyo, a city that serves as a model for a photographic body of work that constitutes a permanent and rigorous investigation into architecture, the industrial world, and the conflicted relationships between humans and nature.

Hatakeyama's photographic work serially examines the city: its past, present, and future. By experimenting with form, he uses the photographic language to reflect on the general relationship between people and their environment. Deploying a wide range of themes, his first series focused on limestone quarries (Lime Hills, Japan, 1986-1991). With Underground (1999), he explored Tokyo's subterranean rivers and urban networks. Nearly a decade later, he returned to his preferred subject by photographing limestone quarries in the basements of Paris (Fallen Sky, 2007). Then came Blast, a series of images begun in 1995, a spectacular reportage on open-pit quarry explosions… Deeply concerned with industrial transformations, he was invited to photograph during the winter of 2003 the coal mines and industrial wastelands of the Rhine area. He produced striking images of the Westphalia coal mine (Zeche Westfalen I/II Ahlen, 2003-2004). Abandoned industrial structures, dynamited factories… His large-format color images accompany and transcend the landscape. In 2009-2010, he photographed the slag heaps, artificial mountains of waste from mining in the Nord-Pas-de-Calais mining basin.

In 2011, Naoya Hatakeyama created his most personal work. After the earthquake and tsunami that struck the Pacific coast of Japan on March 11, 2011, he went to photograph the ruins of his hometown, Rikuzentakata, devastated by the disaster. Kensegawa, his book published in 2013, portrays this ravaged territory. Against the poignant images, images of chaos, he juxtaposes other photographs taken several years earlier, between 2002 and 2010, when the city buzzed with life… For Naoya Hatakeyama, image is a memorial medium. It concentrates the final traces of a past that has forever passed.

Beyond his participation in numerous group and solo exhibitions, Hatakeyama's photographs are held in public collections such as the National Museum of Modern Art Osaka, the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, the Swiss Foundation for Photography in Winterthur, the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris, and the Victoria & Albert Museum in London. In France, Naoya Hatakeyama has exhibited twice at the Rencontres d'Arles in 2003 and 2009, as well as in 2015 at the Domaine du Château de Chaumont-sur-Loire alongside other contemporary artists such as Edward Burtynsky. In 2018 he presented in Nantes for the first time in France the impressive Rikuzentakata series about one of the cities most affected by the March 11, 2011 tsunami, its destruction, the erasure of its hometown, and its colossal reconstruction.

Excellent condition, virtually like new. A personal collection book kept with great care. Shipped protected with reinforced packaging and international tracking guaranteed. For multiple purchases, grouped shipping is possible with reimbursement of any overpaid postage costs via PayPal.

0.5 kg excluding packaging