To look at Takano’s photographs is to welcome and entertain an experience where you are not sure what you are looking at. It’s not that something hidden is disclosed and comes out. Something, which came out but has not been seen, crossed a field of vision through a photograph, and refusal and denial, which were operating the act of looking itself, are clearly withdrawn. Those which had been erased from the field of vision by looking will return to us as if resisting the act of looking. That is the time and space which are opened by Takano’s photographs.
Excerpt from “Manazashi ni fureru” by Ryudai Takano & Ikuo Shinjo
Takano says that he discovers something unexpected he did not intend at the time of photographing when he checks his works afterwards. In his book, Manazashi ni fureru, he is saying that “the very photograph where the person and the place appear with a fresh feeling” is really great. When you realize that daily and trivial scenery in a photograph seems to change completely, it is that moment when you find something there, and something which resided in you is opened up to outside. At that time, the photograph eventually leaves the person who took it (photographer) and shows up in front of the viewer like another person. It is oppositional to the visual experience in modern times, and at the same time presents us a question about what it means “to look.”
This solo show will exhibit about 40 color photographs of daily townscapes taken in 2014, which are from Takano’s “Every Day Photographs,” a series he has been continuing since 1998 without missing a single day.
