Taiji Matsue

Taiji Matsue was born in Tokyo in 1963. After studying geography at the University of Tokyo, he became a photographer, and that academic background directly informs his method. Major series include TRANSIT, CC, JP, LIM, jp0205, and gazetteer. SFMOMA holds multiple works, and the exhibition gazetteer at the Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art was his first full-scale retrospective.^*1

Matsue’s themes include the surface of the earth, geography, mapping, urban texture, anti-picturesque description, scale, flatness, and the optical possibilities specific to photography. He photographs from elevated or frontal viewpoints, excludes horizon and sky, and uses frontal light to suppress shadows. The result is a dense, flat field with little spatial depth, resisting scenic recession.^*5 Tokyo Art Beat’s text on makietaCC explains that the rules of no horizon, no sky, and frontal light without shadows produce photographic flatness and ask what the essence of photography is. Matsue’s training in geography and interest in the earth’s surface move his work away from expressive landscape and toward systematic visual description. His historical significance lies in treating photography not as a window onto scenery but as a field of information, preserving the specificity of place while letting landscape function as map, data field, and visual archive.^*3

Artscape Japan describes Matsue’s roaming camera as a practice that joins geographic interest to systematic photographic description. Tokyo Art Beat precisely explains the formal rules of makietaCC and their effect of flatness. The apparent neutrality of the images is not an absence of meaning; it is a refusal of dramatic viewpoint in favor of accumulated detail, surface, and repetition that reveal the structure of place.^*5