Favourite books: A sublime photographic exploration of man’s relationship with nature

We’re at a moment where everyone is a ‘photographer’ and we see photos primarily on screen. To hold a beautifully printed and carefully curated photography book in your hands is so much more powerful than the experience of browsing photographs on the internet.

I recently received this photography book as a gift, but had wanted it for a while, having known about Naoya Hatakeyama since I lived in Canada. I come from the suburban prairies and had easy access to the wilderness of the Boreal Shield. When I moved to London to study architecture, I was perplexed that Europeans define nature so differently to me, and came to understand that all nature is altered by humans – if not in an obvious way, then by our aesthetic portrayal of wilderness as idealised nature.

Given the environmental crises of our time, architects must consider our cultural attitudes to nature, not just our technical response. We need to move beyond the outdated duality of humans and nature to develop new ways of framing this relationship.

Excavating the Future City is an attempt to search for a new topography and is a lens through which to understand contemporary landscape. There’s a depth to the photographs that’s not romantic, that cuts through the green wash to actively engage with the world, understanding that all of nature is affected by our activity.

What I like about Hatakeyama’s work is that he tries to be a neutral observer without bringing judgement. His photographs are matter of fact and singular. They confound our expectations by decontextualising the subject, such that they appear unfamiliar – as though experienced as an alien observer. This strikes a chord with my teaching at the University of Cambridge, where I encourage students to better understand contexts through sampling techniques that challenge their own assumptions and paradigms.

There’s a great biographical introduction to the book, which provides an enlightening context to the photos, with reference to influences including Richard Misrach, Lewis Baltz, and Bernd and Hilla Becher.

However the richness and nuance of the work can’t be fully articulated in words. Hatakeyama’s photographs are incredibly beautiful – they are technical perfection. There is a common thread of sublime that runs through the work. He sees beauty in unexpected places – such as sewers – challenging a simplistic understanding of nature. He’s clearly critical of what we’re doing to the planet, but there’s a real subtlety in his techniques. Sometimes he’s interested in freezing time, sometimes in drawing attention to the past or future.  He’s always shifting perspective so we’re seeing different sections, scales, and vantage points. And there’s an ever-present ambiguity between the subject and the photographer.

The book arranges 24 series of photographs under five chapter headings that highlight exaggerated aspects of his overall lifetime practice. Each is a lens into the other sections. Nothing is linear.

The first chapter, Birth/Genesis, is about a lime quarry near his hometown. In this, he captures the immense quarry pits, the industrial processing facilities, and the explosive moments when the rock is blasted. There’s a quote from the photographer in the book about how it’s the quarry operators, with their deadpan attitude, that really understand the nature of stone, far better than we can when we project our meanings onto it. Later, when flying over Tokyo, Hatakeyama sees the concrete that was made using the lime and understands this and the quarrying as negative and positive images of the same thing. In his photographs from the air, he invites us to look more closely at the material connections between cities and the natural world.

Among my favourites are three series on the culverted rivers that run through Tokyo. To me they are the most sublime in the book. These rivers are photographed with tight vertical framing, with the city above as a serene background. In the others, we are transported to the otherworldly underground. The scale and otherness is captured in a way that’s incredibly beautiful, with a strange, peaceful calm.

Another focus is on transitional landscapes and pathways in scenes of construction, framing strange junctions and thresholds of unknowable origin that emerge from the constant metabolising of the city over time.

The Real/Model chapter has a different thrust by photographing architectural models of Beijing and New York. He sees photography as a model of the landscape and, by blurring the boundary between actual buildings and models, he questions photography’s supposed indexical relationship to the real.

The last chapter, Death/Rebirth, is a very moving series on his hometown, Rikuzentakata, which was destroyed in the earthquake and tsunami of 2011. Here, the artist’s fascination with transformation and landscape takes a tragic turn as he attempts to document the once familiar neighbourhoods. Struggling to maintain his usual neutral attitude, the work is no longer detached and contemplative – it’s too personal.

But, despite the heaviness and despair, there is a palpable hope that charges his work. The final images of the book are gleaned from personal photos of the town before the tsunami. As the author of the book puts it, ‘with a dash of hope, he wishes to collapse a conventional time sequence of the past-present-future, and create an image out of the rubble that offers a vision of the cityscape to come – an excavation of the future city’.

I can’t draw a straight line between my own practice and these photographs but there are common threads. It’s implicit that there’s an impact in everything we do, and that our work is part of an organic process – a shifting of materials from one place to another. By understanding these themes better, we can become more attuned to how we frame our attitude towards nature and sustainability, and – with hope - more successfully shape our complex relationship with nature. There is much in this book to consider.

Naoya Hatakeyama: Excavating the Future City £50. Published by Aperture, April 2018 282pp