Naoya Hatakeyama - Natural Stories

Venue details

Huis Marseille
Keizersgracht 401
1016 EK Amsterdam
The Netherlands
T:+31 20 531 89 89
www.huismarseille.nl
reception@huismarseille.nl

Event details

Beautifully aesthetic images of the terrible powers we routinely deploy to shape nature to our will have become Naoya Hatakeyama’s trademark. His photographs of the Westfahlen mine in Ahlen (2003/2004) illustrate this very well. The moment that a factory hall is blown up and hangs suspended in the air before losing its rugged profile for ever is captured perfectly: it is like watching a living creature being brought slowly to its knees. Naoya Hatakeyama is unique in his ability to create such precise, refined photographs of moments at which such huge and destabilising forces are at work. He also photographed the recent tsunami in Japan, and the destruction that this cataclysmic wall of water brought about in his own birthplace, Rikuzentakada in Iwate. These are images of terrifying emptiness: a vast expanse of nothing. All three themes are included in the exhibition Natural Stories. In collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Photography in Tokyo.