Publisher's Synopsis
In this new work, Takashi Homma builds a city image by image, using fragments collected in metropolitan areas of Japan and the US. Often employing grids of images, Homma pieces together irregular views - a parallel Hiroshima Peace Museum, or another Empire State Building. The splintered city shown on these pages is peopleless, comprised only of buildings that gaze at one another, in silence; occasionally messages appear - a scrawled word or stencilled number. All the images reveal themselves as photographs, as Homma turns towards the city, but also towards principles of photography itself in upturned images which allude to the camera obscura. Homma does not seek to index any particular city as such, but to render a shadow world, a city's unconscious caught in a dark chamber, suspended in the camera's box. Takashi Homma is a Japanese photographer. His monograph, Tokyo Suburbia (Korinsha,1998) won the Kimura Ihei Award in 1999.
