Naoya Hatakeyama

The Rikuzentakata Cement Plant and Kiyoji Otsuji—Thinking About the External World and the Medium Together

Naoya Hatakeyama was born in Rikuzentakata, Iwate Prefecture, and developed an early interest in the hardness of rock and metal^*4. The first subject he painted on canvas in high school was the cement plant on his route to school. In 1979 he entered the School of Art and Design at the University of Tsukuba and turned toward photography in Kiyoji Otsuji’s classes. In an SFMOMA talk, Hatakeyama identified his interest in the plant and his encounter with Otsuji as starting points for his work^*1.

Otsuji’s teaching joined composition and printing technique to questions of twentieth-century art, reproduction, the readymade, matter, and language. In the critical climate of the 1980s, modernism’s inquiry into photography’s specific properties carried considerable authority, while “literary” or “painterly” photography could be rejected for lacking self-criticism of the medium^*6. This environment encouraged Hatakeyama to construct images clearly while examining how photography transforms the external world. He later argued that after formalism reached its limits, photographers including Nobuyoshi Araki, Nan Goldin, and Larry Clark returned the direct force of the subject to photography^*6. His work developed toward series that held together scrutiny of the medium and attention to socially situated places.

Friedlander, New Landscape, and New Color—Permission to Photograph the Everyday

When Hatakeyama studied photography, Japanese audiences were encountering Lee Friedlander, American documentary work of the 1970s, New Landscape, New Color, and new photographic criticism. Friedlander appeared in Otsuji’s first lecture, and Hatakeyama has recalled the stimulus of an approach that photographed ordinary surroundings with conviction instead of searching for landmarks or events^*1. These imports showed that everyday built landscapes could be analyzed and that ordinary places could command a different kind of attention through photography.

As a student, Hatakeyama made pictures that placed buildings or trees as simple forms within broad spaces. After graduation, Tokyo’s signs, buildings, traffic, and wires divided his field of vision so densely that his previous compositions no longer worked. He returned home in search of open space and revisited the cement plant instead of immediately devising a new urban photography in Tokyo^*1. This impasse directed him beyond the city’s visible appearance toward the materials from which Tokyo was made.

When Photographing Tokyo Failed, the Quarry Became a Study of the City

A cement-plant employee took Hatakeyama to a limestone quarry, an encounter that directly led to Lime Hills. With support from the Japan Limestone Association, he visited mines and factories from Hokkaido to Okinawa for roughly eight years and learned large-format architectural photography in the process^*1. Instead of seeking a composition capable of ordering Tokyo’s complicated streets, he investigated extraction, processing, and transport at the distant sites that generated the city’s form.

Seen from an airplane, Tokyo’s densely built surface resembled the exposed rock of a quarry. Limestone becomes cement and concrete, accumulating in roads, housing, dams, and office districts. Hatakeyama linked the mountain’s missing volume to the city’s mass as movements of the same material, bringing what might appear as separate subjects—a regional industrial landscape and a metropolitan center of consumption—into a single process of urbanization^*1. The idea situated postwar concrete construction and redevelopment after the 1980s within a geography that included extraction sites beyond the city.

Miners’ Distrust—Questioning the Visual Formula of Environmental Accusation

While photographing mines, Hatakeyama heard workers express distrust toward news photographs that presented quarries as symbols of environmental destruction. A cut mountain can form a forceful image of accusation, while the urban life that consumes limestone as roads and buildings disappears outside the frame. Hatakeyama declined to place responsibility solely on extraction companies and returned attention to the chain of consumption that included himself as a city resident^*1.

The experience also changed his understanding of nature. Hatakeyama distinguishes nature as the environment in which people live from nature consumed as a beautiful view, and argues that the sense of beauty is itself shaped by histories of literature and art^*1. A quarry shown as a single wound permits viewers to feel outrage while forgetting its relation to urban life. He therefore connected mines, factories, cities, and underground spaces across long-term series, bringing the position of resource users into the meaning of the images.

Large-Format Color and Nationwide Research—Returning a Single Wound to an Industrial System

Large-format color could register geological strata, heavy machinery, work roads, and the contours of cut rock at once. During nearly eight years of nationwide research, Hatakeyama acquired the techniques of architectural photography and photographed mines as working spaces in which extraction continued^*1. The clarity of the image preserved equipment, labor, geology, and scale beyond an immediate verdict of environmental damage.

Repeatedly photographing mines across Japan also corrects the tendency to treat a single quarry as an exceptional tragedy. Topography, machinery, extraction methods, and surrounding vegetation vary from site to site, while a common industrial system sends limestone from each region into urban construction. The long-term series was chosen to hold local specificity and nationwide structure within the same work.

Blast—Remote Operation and the Collapse of a Safe Observer’s Position

Photographing quarry blasts from a distance with a telephoto lens preserves the divide between a safe observer and a dangerous site. Hatakeyama wanted to examine more closely how rock fractured and fell. A large-format camera could neither use the required shutter speed nor produce a sequence, and a single blast yielded only one frame. He therefore chose a small camera, motor drive, and FM radio remote control^*1.

The camera position was chosen with advice from blasting engineers who understood the rock face, explosives, and direction of falling stone. They predicted how two thousand tons of rock would collapse and indicated positions where the equipment was less likely to be destroyed^*1. Blast is an image made jointly by site knowledge, radio signals, a motorized camera, explosives, and rock. Landscape photography moves here from a distant view to the contact zone where matter changes state.

Aerial Views, Rivers, and Underground Spaces—Changing Viewpoint With the Movement of Matter

Hatakeyama does not preserve one viewpoint as a personal style; he changes position as the research requires. Aerial photography compares quarry faces and urban density at a common scale. Photographs along rivers vertically connect buildings to the water beneath them. Sewers and underground quarries reveal the cavities to which the city sends wastewater or leaves behind after extracting building material^*13. Movement among distant views, ground surfaces, water, and subterranean spaces follows the routes taken by matter.

For exhibitions, Hatakeyama constructs models to test print sizes, spacing on the walls, and movement between series^*5. Viewers walk among ground level, underground spaces, distant prospects, and explosions, understanding separated sites as one social process. Exhibition design turns bodily movement into a means of tracing an urban cross-section.

Light and Photosensitive Material—Nature Within the Photographic Medium

Referring to William Henry Fox Talbot’s “pencil of nature,” Hatakeyama extends nature from mountains and plants before the lens to the light, photosensitive material, chemical reactions, and chance operating within photography itself^*1. In A Bird / Blast, a bird enters the frame at the instant of detonation, introducing an unplanned living presence into the engineered movement of explosives and rock.

This account revises the idea of photographic technology as an instrument of control standing outside nature. The photographer determines composition, exposure, and placement, yet light, emulsion, birds, dust, and the pattern of falling rock add their own results. Hatakeyama’s clear images observe traces of contact between human planning and material response.

Lime Hills, Lime Works, and Blast—Limestone Across Three Timescales

Begun in 1986, Lime Hills photographs limestone quarries across Japan in large-format color, recording terraced quarry faces, work roads, heavy machinery, and surrounding mountains. White rock forms broad planes across the image, while machinery and roads provide measures of scale. The quarry does not become a single symbolic wound; geology, working processes, and vegetation remain within the same field of vision.

Lime Works moves into the factory and photographs the equipment that crushes, transports, and processes limestone into cement^*8. Connecting mines and factories through books and exhibitions makes the white section of rock and the concrete wall of a city appear as different states of the same material. The stillness of the large-format image presents a finished landscape while inviting attention to the daily extraction and processing continuing behind it.

Blast, begun in 1995, divides the rock face before detonation, expansion, dust, and falling stone into sequential frames. A scene that a single photograph might turn into spectacular explosion becomes, across several frames, the process by which rock turns into an urban resource^*11. Lime Hills holds strata and quarry faces within a still image; Lime Works registers the repetitive time of conveyors and kilns; the sequences of Blast break down several seconds of fragmentation. Together, the three series place the same limestone within geological, industrial, and explosive durations.

River Series, Underground, and Ciel Tombé—The City’s Substructure

River Series aligns buildings with the water flowing beneath them along a vertical axis, adding waterways to the city’s visible surface. Underground brings artificial light into sewers and records pipes, walls, water, and reflections in square color images. In SFMOMA’s Underground #7109, a dark conduit extending into the distance and light on the water render the city’s interior as an architectural space^*2.

Ciel Tombé photographs underground quarries and reinforcement structures in Paris. The stone city above was built from material cut below, leaving cavities produced by that movement^*13. The three series present the city’s lower levels as physical conditions of surface life—drainage, extraction, and structural support—rather than as a mysterious separate world.

Natural Stories, Rikuzentakata, and Tsunami Trees—Time After Disaster

The 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami devastated Hatakeyama’s hometown of Rikuzentakata and brought profound personal loss, including the death of his mother. He began photographing before receiving commissions from newspapers, museums, or galleries and continued without deciding where the images would be shown. Hatakeyama has said that he accepted photographs capable of producing silence or discomfort without waiting for them to be validated as art^*16.

The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum’s Natural Stories brought limestone, coal, factories, mines, and Rikuzentakata together as works on the long interaction of human beings and nature^*17. When the exhibition traveled to SFMOMA, the pre-disaster quarry and city series were reread within a career concerned with human powers of construction and changes in nature^*3.

Rikuzentakata presents a large body of photographs as a chronological slideshow, linking the different rates at which debris, embankments, roads, plants, and houses change. Tsunami Trees photographs trees that continue growing after damage by the tsunami, shifting attention from the instant of disaster to years in which plants, construction, and memory proceed at different speeds^*12. Repeated photography preserves several simultaneous times within the land instead of consolidating reconstruction into a linear story of recovery.

After New Topographics—From the Landscape’s Surface to the Material Before and After

The 1975 exhibition “New Topographics” replaced sublime natural scenery with restrained views of industrial zones, cleared land, suburban housing, and other human-altered places^*18. Hatakeyama learned from New Landscape and New Color the confidence to photograph ordinary built environments^*1. Their influence appears in the clarity of his large-format color, while his series move beyond description of the visible surface toward the resources and processes that produce a landscape.

Bernd and Hilla Becher compared industrial structures as types, while Lewis Baltz analyzed the flat surfaces of developed land. Hatakeyama connects mines, factories, aerial cities, rivers, underground spaces, and explosions, following the same material before extraction, during processing, after construction, and in the underground absences left behind. Large-format cameras, remote sequences, aerial views, and subterranean photography provide distances and durations suited to each stage. His position lies in adding material movement, industrial labor, and the choice of photographic technology to analytical landscape photography after New Topographics.

Capitalist Production of Space and “Creative Destruction”

Hatakeyama avoids presenting mining as a simple environmental evil and emphasizes a chain of resource consumption that includes urban residents. Recent criticism has asked how fully the work makes capitalist urban formation visible. Piekalkiewicz reads limestone extraction, concrete production, and high-rise construction as a continuous production of space, and sees in Blast the destructive force on which building depends^*14.

This interpretation may appear to add politics to the formal beauty of large-format photography, but the tension already exists within the work. Precisely rendered quarry faces may be received in museums as beautiful abstractions, while they also possess a use as urban building material. Hatakeyama places mine and city within the same exhibition instead of writing a conclusion into the image, allowing viewers to locate the distance between their own lives and extraction sites.

2011 and After—Words Enter Landscape Photography

The post-disaster work adds private record to Hatakeyama’s earlier landscape research and alters the assumptions carried by the word “landscape.” In an SFMOMA talk, he describes how the same photograph changes once viewers are told that his home once stood beneath a rainbow in the image, and argues that the decision to exclude memory and language in order to see a “pure” landscape is itself ideological^*15.

The question also concerns the public life of disaster photography. Images of Rikuzentakata contain the artist’s personal history, yet in museums they are shared as images of a disaster area, reconstruction policy, land use, and mourning^*9. Hatakeyama accumulated photographs with dates and places while leaving their eventual audience open^*16. Personal memory and public record meet on the same land within the work^*10.

Turning Landscape Into Time Moved by Resources, Technology, and Memory

Hatakeyama treats mountains, factories, cities, underground spaces, and post-disaster land as a continuity of matter and time moving through places. Different apparatuses record the years in which limestone travels from mountain to city, the seconds in which rock collapses during a blast, and the decade-plus transformation of Rikuzentakata through reconstruction and plant growth. The time of landscape photography expands from a moment of exposure to the long processes by which industry and disaster remake land.

After New Topographics made human-altered landscapes visible and the Bechers organized industrial structures typologically, Hatakeyama introduced a landscape’s material prehistory and afterlife into interconnected series. What Jun Tanaka called “mineral urban photography” extends the city beyond its geographic surface into an order formed by geology, extraction, chemistry, and construction^*7. Hatakeyama’s conviction that a photograph records the external world while changing meaning through a viewer’s knowledge and time supports his long-term series, exhibition models, and chronological slideshows^*1.

After Hatakeyama—Landscape Photography as Research Into Architecture, Resources, and Memory

Hatakeyama’s historical “after” appears in his use of landscape photography as sustained research. The look of large-format color is one component of that method. Across several decades he has investigated mines, factories, cities, rivers, underground spaces, and post-disaster land, combining photographic apparatuses, photobooks, exhibition models, slideshows, and lectures to bring distant places and times into a single question. The New Yorker has likewise described the work—from quarries to cities and post-disaster Rikuzentakata—as a study of how cities are built and destroyed^*20.

In the 2023 exhibition The Lives of Documents—Photography as Project, the Canadian Centre for Architecture placed Hatakeyama among artists working since the 1970s who treated photography as a medium among artwork, research tool, and document. The exhibition examined how photography helps shape the built environment and interprets the institutions and processes that produce the visible world^*19. This placement shows that Hatakeyama’s series on mines, cities, and underground spaces have been received as photographic projects for investigating architecture and infrastructure as well as for viewing landscape.

Criticism since Natural Stories has situated the work in relation to the Anthropocene, capitalist production of space, creative destruction, and disaster memory^*14. Sources establishing direct influence on particular later photographers remain limited. What can be established is that Hatakeyama’s work continues to serve as a reference point when photography investigates architecture, infrastructure, resource politics, and post-disaster land beyond the conventional boundaries of landscape photography.