Cell

Cell collects Taiji Matsue's experiments in what he calls "super trimming" — extracting and radically enlarging a single fragment from within a larger photograph — turning found scenes into ambiguous, at times abstract images.

Working from color photographs, many of them casual scenes of leisure such as a hotel pool deck, Matsue isolates a small portion of the frame, the "cell," and blows it up many times over until grain, color, and gesture overtake legible content. The results shift between disorienting, comic, and abstract, echoing the way Antonioni's Blow-Up treats magnification as a route to new, unstable meaning rather than to clarity. The book, published in Tokyo by Akaaka in 2008, includes an interview with Matsue by the photography critic Minoru Shimizu.

Cell extends Matsue's longer-running interest in photographing landscape and terrain from unusual vantage points, testing how far an image can be cropped before it stops describing its subject and starts describing only itself; he later adapted the same idea for tablet screens in the interactive work CCcell.