Excavating the Future City Portfolio

Aperture is pleased to release this limited edition portfolio on the occassion of the publication, Excavating the Future City. This portfolio consists of a suite of six Lambda prints from Naoya Hatakeyama’s iconic Blast series. The prints and a special signed clothbound edition of the book are housed in a handsome slipcase in an edition of ten sets. 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. States his gallery, Taka Ishii, "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."

Portfolio of Six Lambda Prints and a special signed clothbound edition of the book, Excavating the Future City, housed in a slipcase
Paper Size: 9 x 12 inches
Image Size: 9 x 12 inches
Edition of 10 and 3 Artist’s Proofs
Signed and numbered by the artist

Naoya Hatakeyama (b. 1958, Rikuzentakata, Japan) is included in some of the most important public collections in the U.S., Europe, and Japan. He co-represented Japan in the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001, and was given his first solo museum exhibition outside of Japan in 2002 at Kunstverein Hannover. He joined the architect Toyo Ito and others in their efforts on the Golden Lion award–winning exhibition Architecture. Possible here? “Home-for-All”, representing Japan in the 13th Venice Biennale of Architecture in 2012. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art installed a solo exhibition in 2012, originally organized by the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography.