Takashi Homma

Over six years, Japanese photographer Takashi Homma (born 1962) photographed the Tokyo landscape and cityscape in preparation for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. Tokyo Olympia, a continuation and reinterpretation of Homma’s seminal book Tokyo Suburbia, and likewise designed as a large-format board book, features images that capture the massive scale of the megalopolis. One of the sites documented is the old National Stadium, chronicling its transformation into the new National Stadium, and another is the Tsukiji Market just before its relocation to Toyosu Market.
Homma’s photography possesses a uniquely cool gaze that rejects any sentimentality and portrays its subjects with a characteristic sense of distance and cool tonality; he has received acclaim not only in the world of photography but also contemporary art. This volume's canonical (and extremely collectible) 1998 precursor, Tokyo Suburbia, was awarded the Kimura Ihei Commemorative Photography Award in 1999.

The intention behind Takashi Homma: Tokyo and My Daughter is best explained by the photographer himself: “I love my daughter very much. I love Tokyo very much.” Homma’s (born 1963) affection is nearly tangible in this series of 32 color photographs in which images of his daughter are placed beside detail shots of the city’s cars, houses and trees.

Homma’s daughter, captured in various stages of toddlerhood in everyday locations, stares serenely just beyond the camera lens, unselfconscious and generally appearing more interested in the person holding the camera than the device itself: in one photograph, she peers out curiously from the backseat of a car, while in another she points her own tiny pink camera back at her father. Homma’s photography is imbued with a warmth and sincerity that belies his total familiarity with the subjects at hand; he documents Tokyo’s urban landscape with the same tenderness he brings to portraying his daughter.

Internationally acclaimed photographer Takashi Homma (born 1962) first encountered Le Corbusier’s work in Chandigarh, a city in India whose master plan was primarily designed by the architectural pioneer. Since then, Homma has traveled around the world to capture the iconic Le Corbusier style with a particular focus on windows.

Both an homage to Le Corbusier’s architecture and a partial study of the window as a form, Homma’s photography series conveys the extent to which windows function as their own artistic element within the overall design of a building. Rather than simply looking through the windows at the landscapes contained within their frames, Homma’s photographs encourage viewers to also look at the windows and consider them as subjects unto themselves. With Homma’s exquisite compositional instincts, his images offer a new perspective on the overlap between architectural photography and fine-art photography.