When does a landscape die? What does a “dead” landscape look like? And can we see death in a seemingly benign, even beautiful, landscape? Posing these provocative questions, the photographer Sakata Haruto’s Sanrizuka series was first shown in August 2023 in an exhibition, Landscape of death (Eshi suru fūkei), at the artist-run space Totem Pole […]
We seem to have entered a new phase in historical memory vis-à-vis the New Left in Japan in which the focus is gradually moving away from an emphasis on the spectacular showdowns between the state and protesters (usually shown through archival footage) or on the grisly internal violence (usually shown through re-enactments) to pinpoint the […]
As defined by Tokyo Photographic Art Museum curator Tasaka Hiroko, landscape theory (fūkeiron) was an engagement around 1970 with the ways in which “the structure of authority of the state and capital manifested as commonplace, everyday landscapes”.1 It involved an influential coterie of film-makers, photographers and critics in Japan in the late 1960s and early […]