Naoya Hatakeyama: Excavating the Future City Portfolio

Aperture is pleased to release this limited edition portfolio on the occasion of the publication, Excavating the Future City (Aperture, 2018).

For the past thirty years, Japanese photographer Naoya Hatakeyama has undertaken a photographic examination of the life of cities and the built environment. Each of his series focuses on a different facet of the growth and transformation of the urban landscape—from studies of architectural maquettes to the extraction and use of natural materials such as limestone, as it is quarried via explosive blasts and subsequently incorporated into the construction of new buildings.

Hatakeyama began work on the Blast series in 1995. The series was shown in the exhibition “Aspects of Contemporary Photography – another reality,” held during the same year at the Kawasaki City Museum. Hatakeyama has continued to work on the series and it has been presented in numerous exhibitions in Japan and abroad. His gallery, Taka Ishii, states “for Hatakeyama, who has created works that carefully and poetically examine nature, the cities that we have built, and the philosophies that give them form, the photographing of Blast, which is coordinated with an explosives expert who accurately predicts where the shrapnel from the blasted boulders will fly, has been an invaluable experience that has allowed him to reexamine photography’s appeal and the foundations of its technology.”

Each limited-edition print is hand-packed with great care and ships from New York within 3–5 days.