“The more you move, the more information and knowledge you absorb, the more often you encounter surprises in unfamiliar landscapes,” says Taiji Matsue in a conversation with curator Chie Sumiyoshi. “Some say that a photographer’s worldview overflows from within, but that’s a lie,” he continues. “Nothing comes out of the self. You have to keep travelling to places you’ve never been.”
Matsue is a photographer whose technical approach often dominates discussions of his work. It is a natural response to the images he makes; paging through a copy of his book JP-34 in Sankakuyama Books in Kōenji a couple of weeks ago, I found myself asking the same questions. The book presents a series of top-down panoramic views centred on Hiroshima City. Was the artist in a helicopter, flying a hang glider, or even operating a drone?
The photographs render the city almost entirely flat and without shadow. Geometric grids of streets, highways, residential blocks, and industrial zones take on a diagrammatic clarity. The horizon is never visible, directing attention instead to the density of high-resolution detail. If you’ve ever entertained the impossible desire to capture something in its absolute entirety—a whole city, no less—Matsue’s work comes tantalisingly close.
JP-34 takes its title from the ISO code assigned to Hiroshima Prefecture within a numbering system that runs from 01–47. Other works in the series include Shizuoka (JP-22) and Aomori & Akita (JP-0205). Whether Matsue intends to complete the sequence or not, the naming convention suggests an ambition to encompass all 47 prefectures of Japan with the same clinical sense of totality.
The images were indeed photographed from a helicopter, which allowed him to position himself directly in front of the noon sun and produce that unforgivingly crisp aesthetic. Still, I often return to the feeling that the technical process behind a work matters less than the way its creator lives and thinks. The “JP” series involved an elaborate aerial photography process, which offers a satisfying answer to the question, but other works in Matsue’s back catalogue that produce a similar effect were made through entirely different methods.
For the earlier “CC” series, which maps global cities through their ISO city codes, Matsue worked from elevated vantage points with his feet and tripod firmly on the ground. Even so, the images were convincing enough for viewers to assume they had been photographed from the air; he was mistaken for an aerial photographer long before he became one. The same ambiguity appears in Makieta, a series photographed from a meticulously detailed model of Tokyo owned by Mori Building Company. Here too, the images could easily be taken for aerial views of the city itself.
On close scrutiny, the differences between the works become apparent, yet the same “all-over” composition persists throughout. Whether photographing a sprawling metropolis from a helicopter or a miniature model through focus stacking, Matsue produces images with the quality of specimens—cities resembling moss or biological samples, perhaps, under a microscope.
Each project conveys the same underlying worldview. Yet, by Matsue's own account, that view does not emerge from within the self. Where, then, does it come from? Continuing his reflections on travel, he tells Sumiyoshi:
I can’t imagine reading a novel while travelling, for instance. Look out the window! Take in the whole world. That's the real joy of travel. It's the same in everyday life; you have to look around you. Travel and everyday life are two sides of the same coin.
It was likely this sensibility that led me to take that lone copy of JP-34 home from Sankakuyama. Behind the images, you sense not only an artist committed to a rigorous process, but also a deeply curious person, intent on absorbing as much as possible in the limited time available to them
I’d never given it much thought, but whenever I pack a novel before travelling, it invariably becomes dead weight. More often, I find myself fixed to the train window or standing over the balcony, watching the landscape. I might listen to music in transit, but when walking through a city, I want to hear nothing beyond its own ambience. At times, I’ve felt I was neglecting some intellectual or cultural obligation by not reading on the road or pairing music with experience, but in Matsue’s worldview the idea feels misplaced: you have to look around you.
However, there is only so much of the world I can absorb in this way before the need to process it begins to assert itself. Matsue seems to negotiate this tension by compressing periods of travel and photography into creative stints.
I usually go on two photography trips a year. Each trip lasts about 50 days, roughly three weeks at a time, and I drive alone, taking pictures and gradually turning the accumulated photographs into works.
He explains that the act of “taking pictures” accounts for only ten percent of the process. Critical attention may focus on the machinery and settings involved in that portion, but the labour of realising the work lies in the remaining ninety percent: the research, preparation, and subsequent effort required to bring the piece into being.
And so, back from Tokyo at the desk in London, surrounded by gigabytes of photographs and reams of mental notes, the next phase of our cycle begins. We travel to places we have never been and attempt to absorb the world in full, only to return home and slowly process what we’ve seen.
Still, as Matsue observes, travel and everyday life are two sides of the same coin; one must remember, every so often, to look up from the desk and pay attention to what is outside the window.
Until we meet in the process,
AJ
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