Last day (sorry, but it seems that I never manage to update my blog on the same date, but at least it is an alteration to yesterday ;) I saw the photography exhibition of the Japanese artist Taiji Matsue here in FFM’s L.A. Galerie. Though it was a small one, consisting of city and landscape pictures he shot around the world, it was astonishing to see how detailed and endless these photos have been. Have a look at one of them taken in Sydney.

And another one from Kuala Lumpur:

Unfortuntelly yesterday was the last day of the exhibtion, but maybe it is also shown somewhere else and you can check it out there. But here is also a clipping of the press article about it to learn something about the artist techniques and his intentions:

“In the current exhibition, Matsue’s characteristic mountain scenes are coupled with a number of his new works: urban landscapes, views of street jungles and masses of houses. Matsue also retained the compositional method he had developed with the landscapes: The horizon is cut out completely so that buildings and streets, as before rocks and vegetation, cover the entire picture.

The traditional western landscape–be it painting or photograph–aims at creating the illusion of three-dimensionality, usually through a central perspective with foreground, middle ground and background and a view of the horizon. Not so in Matsue’s pictures. The scenery here is entirely two-dimensional. Space is reduced to a flat surface, and it seems like the landscape (or the city) extends infinitely beyond the limits of the photograph. There is no aesthetic hierarchy among the objects, no compositional “clue” that might stress certain elements or put them in relation to the viewer.

This constructed objectivity is a result of Matsue’s photographical technique. His shots are sharply focused throughout and full of details. Because of the great level of exactness and highly differentiated gray tones, all elements can be recognized separately. Even the lighting is “objective,” as every little detail is equally exposed and no dramatic light-and-shadow play is added to enhance the effect.

Matsue’s images are like an investigation of the surface structure of the earth. The screes, the rugged mountain slopes and their vegetation, the forests, all seem to follow certain intricate patterns. With the urban landscapes, too, Matsue’s focus is not so much on organized growth, but on developments whose underlying principles we do not yet understand in full. In addition, his work reflects on the medium of photography itself, which alone enables us to have a panoramic view and see all the details at the same time, something the naked eye cannot normally achieve. Photography also facilitates the juxtaposition of images from very different places, whereas the projection onto a flat surface accentuates their artistic quality.”