My Dog, Royce 1, 2005

For over a decade, Takashi Homma has turned his lens toward Tokyo's suburban environs and urban center. His vision of Tokyo has navigated a finely nuanced line between sterility and sentimentality, presenting a sleek, contemporary vision of a postmodern megalopolis populated by a new generation of video-game aficionados and enervated fashionistas, but also the site of cutting-edge architectural experiments and quiet rooftop gardens. Homma deftly picks up the baton from earlier Japanese photographers such as Daido Moriyama, and crafts a contemporary portrait of the modern-day metropolis that is both cinematic and complex.

As Ivan Vartanian writes of the artist's most current work, "Homma's once dispassionate eye now shows a modicum of connectivity, of personal involvement. The photographer even inserts himself into his photographs and begins to address themes that are somewhat private: his studio, his desk, his dog, and even, as in his retitling of an earlier 2001 photograph 'Myself'. The work My dog, Royce 1, 2005 chosen as the cover image for the artist's monograph, is just such an example of this connectivity."

This limited edition print coincided with the release of Takashi Homma: Tokyo (Aperture, 2008), the first Homma volume to be published for an international audience. The book compiles selections from each of his previously published titles about the city, including Tokyo Suburbia, his seminal work, now considered a contemporary classic.

C-Print
Paper Size: 12 1/16 x 9 1/2 inches
Image Size: 11 5/8 x 9 1/2 inches
Edition of 30 and 5 Artist’s Proofs
Signed and numbered by the artist

Takashi Homma (b. 1962, Tokyo, Japan) studied photography at Nihon University Col­lege of Art but left in 1984 to take a job as an in-house photographer at a Tokyo adver­tising agency. In 1991, he moved to London to work as a photographer for i-D maga­zine. In 1999, he was awarded a Kimura Ihei Commemorative Photography Award for the project Tokyo Suburbia (1998). Homma currently lives in Tokyo.