Naoya Hatakeyama: Excavating the Future City

The first English-language survey of Naoya Hatakeyama, whose thirty-year study of cities and the materials that build them has made him one of the defining photographers of the transformed Japanese landscape.

Organized around five chapters, the book brings together twenty-four of Hatakeyama's series, from labyrinthine city views and high-speed images of exploding limestone quarries to studies of architectural maquettes and documentation of the damage left by the 2011 tsunami in his hometown of Rikuzentakata. Essays by Yasufumi Nakamori, Toyo Ito, and the artist himself accompany the plates. Aperture published the volume for the exhibition Excavating the Future City: Photographs by Naoya Hatakeyama at the Minneapolis Institute of Art in 2018.

Hatakeyama represented Japan at the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001 and had his first solo museum show outside Japan the following year at Kunstverein Hannover; his work was also part of the Golden Lion-winning Japanese pavilion at the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale. This survey gathers his full arc, from early quarry and city studies through the tsunami work that marked a turn toward his own history.