TAB Event - Naoki Honjo "Scripted Las Vegas"

Naoki Honjo "Scripted Las Vegas"

This event has ended.
At Epson Imaging Gallery Epsite
Media: Photography

Honjo's first photo collection "Small Planet" was a bestseller (several tens of thousands of copies) depicted landscapes as artificial constructions similar to miniature dioramas, a technique that reinstated cities as essentially man-made environments. His photographs possessed a certain toy-like charm that roused playful childlike reactions in his viewers. In 2006, Honjo won the Ihei Kimura Prize for this work. Since then, he has continued to make fascinating work using a 4x5 camera and a shifted lens angle with respect to the film.

This exhibition, Honjo's first at Epsite, features airborne footage of Kenya and Hawaii taken from a helicopter. This working method was conceived in order to further develop the shifted lens technique for use in high altitude conditions.

The water supply made possible by the Hoover Dam, situtated 35km from Las Vegas and completed in 1936, is the literal life source of much of America's urban development. The water from the dam passes through deserts, irrigating the orderly, well-planned residential suburbs that encircle the Las Vegas city center and supporting its hive of activity. In a sense, Hongo has traced the progress of America's symbolic style of urban development and city planning, using a helicopter to transcribe that experience in the form of panoramic landscapes.

These images juxtapose the yawning expanses of nature, flourishing urban development and human residential environments. In Las Vegas, the borders between these three are drawn especially distinctly, and Honjo's vision in particular is suffused with a sense of vital reality in its wide-angled depiction of the immensity of the urban growth in this area.