Gallery Visit

Learning outcome P2

tate modern

On the 7th of February I went to tate modern to find some inspiration for project work of “Cruel and Tender”. Unfortunately the appropriate exhibition had already finished replaced by the French photographer “Dora Maar”. I just watched remained art works which were open to the public.

• 

• 

• 

Display of “Living Cities”

There were some very nice photographes which attracted me in terms of humans and urban live.

This display includes a variety of responses to the modern city from artists around the world, ranging from explorations of the built environment to close-up images recording the minutiae of daily life. The artworks here date from the 1970s right up to the present day, commenting in various ways on th cities in which the artists themselves have lived and worked.

• 

• 

In particular, the artists reveal aspects of the city that would not be considered part of a traditional overview. Considering characteristics of urban living such as displacement and migration, sub-culture and community, utopian plans for an ideal city, or power and political uprising, they uncover the hidden stories that fall outside of the tourist guidebooks and A-Z maps.

photographs of Naoya Hatakeyama

I was inspired by art works of the Japanese photographer Naoya Hatakeyama. His photographs explore our relationship with both urban and natural landscapes. Following he records patterns of lights found in built environment in Tokyo, Japan.

“Everything is Illuminated”

Hatakeyama describes his approach to the series Maquettes/Light,
“The night view of Tokyo is especially shimmering. One can often find nightlights regularly lining an exterior passageway that connects the individual units of an apartment building. The appearance of regularly linded flourescent lights is characteristic of Tokyo’s skyline at night. I started taking pictures of this kind of light with a small camera around 1995. i got on a motorcycle every night and went out here and there and gathered the lights of the apartment and other buildings.”

• 

• 

• 

The photographs were taken using a small camera, placed on a tripod. When framing a subject, Hatakeyama paid particular attention to its verticality. He adjusted the settings on his camera, exposing his black and white film to light for two to ten seconds. For each image the chosen exposure was just enough to reveal a division between a building and the night sky.

Hatakeyama experimented with the display of the photographs. He first produced them as gelatin silver prints. Feeling something was missing, he made black and white transparencies from the same films. He assembled the original paper prints on these transperencies and placed them on light-boxes. This layering of both paper prints and transparencies emphasised the dark areas of shadow in his images while still allowing light to shine through the highlighted parts. The resuliting work on light-boxes feature sharp contrasts, the darkest areas of his images double in density and the brightest points appear more brilliant. Hatakeyama titled the work Maquettes/Light. He felt his images of buildings at night, lit and scaled down, resemble architectural models.