HOMMA, Takashi - 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.

Book review
"Takashi Homma has composed ›The Narcissistic City‹ from images he photographed with a pinhole camera in various cities in Japan and the USA. And it may well be that the book is also Takashi Homma´s dispute with the city itself. But primarily, it is something completely different.

It is a remake. A remake of the Beatles song ›REVOLUTION 9‹.

Released 1968 on the ›White Album‹ ›Revolution 9‹ is a wild collage of sound snippets, tape loops, repetetive sound and text components, desperate shouting, stacked and layered, forward and backward playing fragments and pure noise - John Lennon´s vision of how the revolution might feel when it really happens.

Modern studio technology has been used, but this was 50 years from now. Analog so.

And Takashi Homma? He takes pinhole images, alienates them, repeats them, builds collages, emphasizes text fragments, also repeats these, SICK OF GOODBYS, turns Skylines upside down, interlaces everything with gatefolds, starts giving the count with 1 and 2, lands on the 9, then REVOLUTION, then 9, then ciphers, then 9 ...

I will now listen to the old Beatles record and flip through the book again.

Number 9 .. Number 9 .. Number 9 ..." (Thank you for these words, Hannes Wanderer!)


About Japanese photographer, Takashi HOMMA (b.1962)
Takashi Homma is a Japanese photographer.
His monograph, called 'Tokyo Suburbia' (Korinsha,1998/2000) won the Kimura Ihei Award in 1999. Other titles - some are still available at Café Lehmitz Photobooks - are: 'Baby Land' (Little Miore 1997), 'Hyper Ballad. Icelandic Suburban Landscapes' (Switch 1997), 'Tokyo Children' (Little More 2001), 'Stars and Stripes in New York' (Casa Brutus 2002), 'In Between: Denmark & Poland' (2005),'Tokyo and my daughter' (Nieves 2006), 'New Waves' (Parco 2007), 'Tokyo' (Aperture 2008), 'First, Jay Comes' (Hassla 2009), '35 Years later' (Thunderstorm 2009), 'Trails' (2009), 'M' (Gallery 360 2010), 'In our nature' (Superlabo 2011), 'New Documentary' (Asahi Shinbunsha 2011), 'Mushrooms from the forest' (Perimeter 2011), 'Our Mountain (2012), 'Mountain Photographer' (Superlabo 2012), 'Lost Home' (with Daido Moriyama, Superlabo 2013), 'New Documentary' (Superlabo 2014), 'New Waves 2000-2013' (Gendaikaiga 2014)