Photo exhibition by Izuru TAKEYA   

“Many hours have passed. When I look back on those times, I feel as if I can understand a little more about the meaning of the time that has been placed upon them. I have walked and pressed the shutter while expecting the unexpected and the incalculable. There is a sense of various movements being reset, and a refreshing smell. Early one morning in a mountain village, the ever-changing expression of the sky, morning dew on a spider's web, a raccoon hit by a car, dots moving slowly in the high sky. The sensation of being surrounded and enveloped by 8,000,000 beings, with the flickering of the atmosphere and the shifting of the light on your skin, is like a feeling that activates every cell in your body. I feel as if these sensations support my urge to see new things. Start walking and roaming around, and someday you will find something.”
(Afterword to the photo book)

With the cooperation of various people, I have compiled the photographs I have taken in this way, selecting 500 photographs by each of the 47 prefectures that were not included in “Nihon no Kakera” 2017 and “Shadow Thief” 2020, with the smell of the land in mind: personal and universal, realistic and abstract, old and new. I have selected 500 photographs with the smell of the land in mind. We hope you will take a look at them.

For this exhibition, I will be showing prints of images selected from “Eyes on the Move 1990-2023”, made using a technique known as brom oil, which was used in the early 1900s. This is one of my attempts to use various classical photographic printing methods that I have been working on for the past ten years, and I became interested in it when I saw Nakaji Yasui's exhibition last year. The metallic silver in gelatin silver prints is removed by bleaching, and oil-based ink is struck onto the remaining hardened gelatin. The degree of hardening causes the ink to adhere differently, and when the ink is dipped in water, the repulsive action of the water and oil causes the image to appear. We hope you enjoy the unique texture of the print.

Izuru Takeya