Special ExhibitionTAIJI MATSUE　gazetteer

Over the years, Taiji Matsue (born in Tokyo in 1963) has traveled all over the world and taken photographs of various areas. Matsue has persistently focused on the surface of the land or earth, including mountains with exposed rocks, woodlands with a thick growth of trees, cities with rows of high-rise buildings, and streets lined with old houses. By omitting horizon lines from his compositions and following a self-imposing rule that he always shoot in direct light to avoid producing shadows, Matsue has constantly pursued a planar quality that is the true essence of photography. In this way, he carefully eliminates contrast, depth, and any distinction between the center and the periphery, to create pictures in which all of the visible elements are treated equally.

Matsue, who has produced monochrome photographs since the 1980s, made his first color photo book in 2005. While incorporating new techniques, which are constantly changing due to technological advances, including new types of photographic equipment and developing methods, Matsue has continually endeavored to create new kinds of photographs. The titles of his works make use of geographical names and city codes. This exhibition, gazetteer (i.e., an index of geographical information), serves as the first retrospective of Matsue’s career. It systematically presents Matsue’s work, a collection of photographs bearing the names of places throughout the world, from his earliest to his most recent efforts.

Exhibition flyer（PDF:613KB）