Taiji Matsue

Travel, Daido Moriyama, and Geography

Traveling to places and looking closely at the land preceded Matsue’s decision to become a photographer. In an interview published with Hashima, he recalled traveling throughout Japan from about age ten; by the summer he was fourteen, he had visited nearly the entire country and was drawn to old towns, industrial districts, canals, mines, and abandoned mines. His photographs of Hashima in 1983 began when he found an opportunity to reach the island while traveling through Kyushu. Matsue later described Hashima as “a document of a journey.” Moving through unfamiliar places on foot and bringing back what he encountered as photographs was already fundamental to his early work.^*31

The immediate impetus to consider photography as a profession came at nineteen, when Matsue was strongly affected by Daido Moriyama’s photobook Light and Shadow. He later showed Moriyama his own photographs and recalled that Moriyama rejected them outright, leaving him with the sense that he had to find something of his own.^*1 The encounter forced him to move beyond imitation and ask what his photography could be grounded in. Minoru Shimizu argues that Matsue transformed an interest in the tactile visual quality of Moriyama’s coarse printed images into photographs that compel close inspection of high-resolution detail.^*19

At the same time, Matsue studied geography in the Faculty of Science at the University of Tokyo and worked with computer image processing. He had been interested in electronics since childhood and has recalled using mainframe computers in the 1980s to turn Landsat earth-observation data into images, writing his own programs for procedures such as edge enhancement.^*1 This gave him experience of the earth’s surface as coordinate-based data converted into an image from which terrain and physical states could be read—a mode of seeing distinct from ordinary scenic vision. Encountering land through travel and reading information about the earth’s surface recorded by machines developed side by side during his early formation as a photographer.

By the mid-1980s Matsue was photographing Hashima, pavement, walls, manhole covers, and other surfaces; TRANSIT was presented in 1987. artscape Japan traces the series back several years before that presentation and situates it within the trajectory from Matsue’s early work to his retrospective.^*5 Later exhibition materials identify his experience of walking and photographing the low-shadow streets of Andalusia in 1988 as a turning point from TRANSIT toward gazetteer.^*4 Materials for the 2012 Higashikawa Awards state that a 1991 trip to Yemen helped establish his method of recording the earth’s surface precisely and evenly under frontal light.^*38 The Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art retrospective likewise organized the development from TRANSIT through gazetteer, CC, and JP around a sustained interest in the earth’s surface and continuing changes in photographic and printing technology.^*6

Urban and Landscape Photography in the 1980s

When Matsue began working in the late 1980s, several Japanese photographers were also reconsidering the city and the land as subjects in their own right, separate from their use as famous views or backdrops for personal feeling. Ryuji Miyamoto published Architectural Apocalypse in 1986, photographing buildings in the process of demolition and recording destruction and urban change themselves.^*29 Around the same time, Naoya Hatakeyama began photographing limestone quarries in Lime Hills; his later work connected extraction sites, factories, and concrete cities through chains of material movement and production.^*30

Matsue likewise photographed cities, extraction sites, roads, and buildings, but his work developed along a different line. Miyamoto connected the disappearance of architecture to urban history, while Hatakeyama traced causal chains from raw material to city. Matsue placed natural terrain, residential districts, and cemeteries under the same photographic conditions, developing a method for recording the earth’s surface before assigning a different narrative to each place. The comparison clarifies how Miyamoto, Hatakeyama, and Matsue chose different units and methods in response to a shared question in Japanese photography from the late 1980s onward: what, exactly, should a city or a landscape be treated as?

Across Matsue’s statements and work, one question repeatedly emerges: should the content of a photograph be limited to what the photographer judged important at the moment of exposure? Human vision divides a scene into center and background and selects what it wants to see. A lens records pavement, windows, distant figures, and vegetation at the same time, including details the photographer may not have noticed on site. To retain as much of that mechanical record as possible, Matsue tightly controls the horizon, shadows, focus, camera height, and the extent of the frame. He has described enlarging a road photograph and discovering traces of past construction that he had not noticed when taking it; he also describes his method in terms of using the camera as a “machine” as close to the limits of its performance as possible.^*1

The Camera’s Record and Human Vision

In the Landsat imagery Matsue handled at university, the earth’s surface was processed as an image from which information about particular locations could be read. Satellite images and Matsue’s photographs are not equivalent, but both involve reading information from an image that exceeds what the naked eye can register at once. Matsue himself has said that human vision does not perceive everything at a site accurately, whereas the lens retains information from the scene.^*1

His decisions therefore concentrate on the conditions of recording. Before making the exposure, he determines what light, angle, height, focus, and field of view will preserve a broad range of information across the surface. In another conversation, he described his approach as a straightforward method faithful to the camera’s principles, emphasizing the effort to draw out the machine’s capabilities as fully as possible.^*2 His break from imitating Moriyama, his training in geography and image processing, and his insistence on using the camera as a machine each support, from a different direction, a photography that does not rest solely on subjective emphasis.^*1

Horizon, Frontal Light, and Shadow

Excluding the horizon and sky and working in clear frontal light helps Matsue limit the eye’s movement toward a distant vanishing point while preserving detail throughout the frame. In a conversation with Midori Matsui at the National Art Center, Tokyo, the reduced scale difference between foreground and distance was linked to treating the image as a single surface, while the chosen light preserves a large quantity of information.^*3 The Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art likewise notes that these rules weaken the distinction between center and edge, allowing elements across the image to retain a comparable degree of clarity.^*6

Minoru Shimizu analyzes Matsue’s usual format as one that closes off a composition leading the eye “beyond” the horizon and redirects attention from spatial depth to high-resolution information.^*32 Flattening does not mean reducing detail. An oblique aerial view that leads the eye into the distance establishes an order from foreground to background; a view from directly overhead can turn variations in elevation into pattern. Matsue typically looks diagonally downward while keeping the surface nearly frontal, retaining relief while making it difficult for any single point to dominate the image.^*32 Zoltán Somhegyi similarly links Matsue’s removal of the horizon and minimization of shadows to a flattened treatment of the earth’s surface that does not establish a privileged center or a hierarchy between natural and artificial elements.^*24

“Absolute Focus” and High Resolution

This construction required high resolution. Shimizu calls Matsue’s method “absolute focus,” distinguishing it from conventional deep focus, in which the human eye accepts a certain range as sufficiently sharp. He describes it as an optical condition grounded in the principle of a lens focused at infinity rather than in what appears sharp enough to human vision.^*32 “Absolute” here is not a judgment of perfection; it marks a refusal to use naked-eye perception as the standard.

Shimizu further argues that a high-resolution image develops a “depth of information”: when one area is enlarged, another image can be extracted from within it.^*20 Because roads, windows, distant figures, rock faces, and trees remain legible, differences in density and form persist even when conventional depth and compositional emphasis are reduced. Shimizu’s essay in gazetteerCC likewise identifies this accumulation of high-resolution information, in place of conventional spatial depth, as central to Matsue’s form.^*27 High resolution therefore does more than display technical precision. It keeps areas that were not primary subjects at the moment of exposure available for later examination.

This requirement also shaped Matsue’s move into color. He photographed in color earlier, but analog color printing could not preserve the focus and quantity of information he wanted. He began presenting color work in earnest only when digital scanning and printing reached sufficient quality. The commentary for gazetteerCC likewise identifies digital technology as a turning point because it allowed “absolute focus” and an excessive density of information to be sustained in color.^*27 For Matsue, digital technology became a means of preserving a recording density he had already been pursuing, rather than a way to introduce a new visual effect.

Place Codes in gazetteer and CC

Gazetteer means a geographical dictionary; CC uses city codes, while JP uses codes for Japanese prefectures. The Tokyo Photographic Art Museum identifies the city code attached to each title as a basic organizing principle of CC, a series begun in 2001.^*7 The photobook jp0205 likewise organizes aerial views of Aomori and Akita through geographic codes, allowing multiple locations to be compared in sequence.^*15

These naming systems do more than turn places into anonymous patterns. They remove descriptive judgments such as “beautiful mountain” or “vast city” from the title while retaining the shooting location as a name or code. Somhegyi notes Matsue’s encyclopedic accumulation of places without establishing hierarchies such as famous versus unknown or natural versus artificial.^*24 At high resolution, concrete differences among roads, buildings, vegetation, and terrain remain visible; names and codes connect those differences back to specific locations. The combination of visual information and geographic indexing makes individual places comparable even when the photographic rules remain constant.

A Photographic Design Without a Dominant Subject

Matsue’s images contain few dramatic shadows or central figures, but this does not mean that the photographer makes fewer decisions. Midori Matsui describes his vision as “impersonal”: it avoids a dominant center and accepts details with a relatively even visual force, producing a structure unlike conventional landscape photographs in which one viewing subject integrates foreground, middle distance, and background.^*3 Matsue, meanwhile, has spoken about his preference for strong midday light and the pleasure he finds in an abundance of information.^*3

For aerial photography he plans the flight path, time, direction of the sun, and altitude; on the ground he also selects viewpoints and light with care.^*2 artscape Japan notes that many works in gazetteer and CC were not made from aircraft. Matsue traveled in search of usable elevated positions—hills, cliffs, towers, and tall buildings.^*5 The relative invisibility of the author in the finished image is therefore an effect of where judgment is concentrated. Instead of selecting an expressive face or dramatic contrast, Matsue chooses place, time, light, and focus so that detail can remain legible across a broad field.

Hashima / TRANSIT / gazetteer

The photographs Matsue made on Hashima in 1983 precede the evenly structured elevated views for which he later became known. Hashima is a record of roughly twenty-four hours, arranged in near chronological order from the day before he reached the island through his departure. Matsue himself described it as “a document of a journey.”^*31 The standardized rules of gazetteer are not yet present, but an early form of his later method can already be seen in the continuous gathering of surfaces while walking through a place.

In TRANSIT, pavement, walls, manhole covers, rubble, and other surfaces appear at a distance close to the body. The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston holds Kumamoto, Japan (1985) as part of this series.^*12 Gazetteer later expanded the field to mountains, deserts, forests, and cities around the world, developing into a long-term accumulation of photographs paired with place names. The Hiroshima City Museum of Contemporary Art retrospective gazetteer presented this development as a continuous trajectory from the early work through CC, JP, LIM, moving images, and makieta.^*6

CC / JP

CC photographs cities from elevated positions on the ground and related viewpoints, assigning city codes to the titles. JP records Japanese prefectures from low altitude and uses prefectural codes based on ISO 3166-2. SFMOMA holds the 2005 work JP-22 08.^*11 SYD 20119 (2012), from CC, is held by the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum.^*13 For aerial shoots, Matsue plans flight positions, time, direction of sunlight, and altitude in advance, making numerous exposures during a single flight.^*2

In the photobook jp0205, each turn of the page shifts between locations in Aomori and Akita. Repetition of the same photographic rules brings differences in terrain, roads, vegetation, and settlements into sequence.^*15 JP-34 similarly brings Hiroshima City, Miyajima, Kure, and Etajima into one book, creating a duration of comparison distinct from that of a single large print.^*16

JP-01 SPK / JP-34

JP-01 SPK (2014) includes photographs that deliberately exceed rules Matsue had already established. Shimizu first summarizes his usual conditions—clear weather, frontal light, frontal orientation, no horizon, low altitude, and “absolute focus”—then draws attention to the arrival of clouds, oblique light, shadows, diagonal compositions, and views from ground level in this book.^*32 Its sixty-four photographs move from forest through quarry and golf course to cemetery, suburb, and city, carrying several kinds of surface from nature to urban space within a single sequence.^*32

In the continuation of his essay, Shimizu places the cemetery between nature and city, past and present, and reads the ground-level photographs through the history of Sapporo’s settlement and traces of forgotten people. In the snow scenes and residential views near the end of the book, he argues, distance and far views that Matsue had previously suppressed return, bringing place-specific and generational memory into the work.^*33

JP-34 includes Hiroshima City, Miyajima, Kure, and Etajima. Nobuo Kuraishi argues that the distant elevated viewpoint can approach wounds of history still embedded in the contemporary surface from an unexpected distance.^*16 The series does not isolate only objects that symbolize the atomic bombing or war. Roads, rivers, housing, and terrain are recorded with the same precision, and that shared treatment is central to the work.

cell / Moving Images / TYO-WTC

cell extracts details of people and objects from within high-resolution photographs even though they were not subjects Matsue consciously selected at the time of exposure. Matsue has explained that he collected information he noticed only after enlarging the photographs into the photobook cell.^*1 A small fragment of the original image becomes a new photograph, making the series one of the clearest demonstrations that what the photographer saw at the moment of exposure and what the photograph actually recorded need not coincide.

In the moving-image works he began in 2010, long shots appear almost still while tiny details—a person, bird, or car—move within the frame. Shimizu describes them as “moving photographs” in which digital technology connects the single instant of a photograph to the continuous time of video.^*21 In TYO-WTC, Matsue reverses his earlier method of traveling the world to collect surfaces. He repeatedly photographs a limited number of locations in Tokyo and New York over long periods, bringing construction, traffic, and human movement into sequences of urban change.^*39 If cell excavates the interior of a single photograph, the moving works and TYO-WTC introduce differences of time into the same place.

LIM / makieta

LIM photographs cemeteries around the world as surfaces containing gravestones, plots, vegetation, and roads. TARO NASU’s exhibition text describes the work as applying the same gaze used for deserts, mountains, and cities to cemeteries, recording surfaces marked by religion and regional culture without isolating the cemetery solely as a symbol of death.^*36 Here Matsue’s rules are applied to subjects already charged with meaning: sentiment is not built into the composition in advance, while the details present at the site remain equally precise.

makieta photographs urban and topographic models so that they approach the appearance of actual locations in CC. Matsue has said that he photographed urban models in Quito in 2007 and Tokyo in 2009, developing the series more fully from 2016 onward.^*9 The techniques are in fact different: CC records distant subjects, while makieta requires macro photography that holds the entire surface of a model in focus, a distinction Matsue himself has emphasized.^*9 In makietaCC, the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum placed the two series together and adjusted their apparent scale so that actual sites and models became difficult to distinguish from the photographs alone.^*8 The series tests the problem of keeping a broad field and minute detail within one image by changing the scale of the subject itself, not simply the shooting distance.

Beyond New Topographics

The 1975 exhibition New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-Altered Landscape presented suburban housing, industrial zones, construction sites, and other ordinary human-modified environments with photographs that restrained dramatic light and the sublime conventions of landscape.^*18 The Centre national des arts plastiques exhibition ATLAS (2012) likewise treated New Topographics as an important reference for contemporary landscape photography and included Matsue within a lineage concerned with typology, serial work, and altered land.^*25

Matsue shares its visual restraint and its refusal to foreground the photographer’s emotions, but the unit of his investigation is different. New Topographics was organized around the idea of a “man-altered landscape.” Matsue places deserts, mountains, forests, cemeteries, and models under the same rules as cities and developed land. Comparing CC with Japanese landscape debates around 1970 and the unpeopled landscapes that followed New Topographics, Shimizu notes that people need not become central subjects for houses, roads, signs, distant figures, and traces of construction to remain dispersed across Matsue’s high-resolution urban fields.^*22 His question extends beyond altered land: what remains in the record when surfaces, natural or artificial, are subjected to the same photographic conditions?

The 2005 German exhibition Landscape as a Metaphor was conceived against an era in which satellite technology had made almost the entire terrestrial surface measurable and recordable. It expanded landscape from images of pure nature to a medium through which industrialization, urbanization, and social change could be addressed. Matsue appeared alongside Robert Adams, Luigi Ghirri, Naoya Hatakeyama, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and others as an artist dealing with nature through classification and abstraction.^*37 Given Matsue’s background in geography and satellite imagery, it is more accurate to situate him as a photographer reconsidering how landscape can be recorded in an age when the earth’s surface is already visible as maps, satellite images, and data than to treat him as a Japanese version of New Topographics.

Matsue and the Bechers

Matsue and Bernd and Hilla Becher share the long-term repetition of standardized photographic rules that makes comparison possible across a series. The Bechers recorded water towers, winding towers, blast furnaces, and other industrial structures of the same function with frontal views, black-and-white film, large-format cameras, and even light, then arranged related structures in grids. Hamburger Bahnhof identifies the isolation of a single building against a neutral sky and the tabular format of typology as central to their work.^*26

Matsue also standardizes conditions, but his unit of comparison is different. The Bechers center a single structure and compare buildings that share a function. Matsue does not isolate one building; cities and terrain fill the frame, and the archive accumulates according to the name or code of where each photograph was made.^*27 Nature, city, cemetery, and model are not confined to separate typologies. The Bechers made morphological differences among related industrial structures comparable. Matsue’s standardization places heterogeneous surfaces under the same conditions so that differences in density, arrangement, terrain, and architecture remain available for comparison. The productive point of comparison is therefore less a direct genealogy than the distinct purposes to which standardized photographic rules are put.

Why Break the Rules?

JP-01 SPK matters because Matsue breaks rules he had used for years within the work itself. Shimizu argues that clouds, oblique light, shadows, diagonal compositions, and ground-level views bring distance and time back into photographs that had usually suppressed them.^*32 From the placement of the cemetery between nature and city, past and present, Shimizu develops his reading that “photographs are graves”: names and images are inscribed in matter and continue to remain after being detached from the people or meanings to which they once referred.^*33

Near the end of the book, snow scenes and ground-level houses appear. Shimizu reads another kind of distance here—“memory,” linked to Sapporo in the 1960s and 1970s and to personal experience. He also records how local viewers who recognized a shooting location began comparing the photograph with their own memories.^*34 These departures make clear that Matsue’s rules were never a doctrine for permanently excluding the meanings of place. They first suppress a narrative or perspective prepared in advance by the author; when memory and time become difficult to address within that method, the rules themselves change. Testing what photography can record, and what it leaves out, takes precedence over preserving a fixed style.

Elevated Views, Governance, and Kunimi

Looking down on land from an elevated position has generated sharply opposed readings. In his review of makietaTYO, Shimizu treats the panoramic view from above as the field of vision of a ruler, rereading CC, JP, and makieta through the military and political histories attached to aerial vision.^*23 The deeper a viewer becomes absorbed in the details of CC, he argues, the easier it is to lose awareness of who is looking and from where. In makieta, the photographer’s position overlaps more explicitly with the position from which an urban model can be planned and possessed, bringing the politics of the overhead view to the foreground.

Natsuki Ikezawa, writing for JP-01 SPK, offers a very different reading. He connects the elevated view of land to the ancient practice of kunimi, reading the act of surveying the land as one of praise and blessing.^*35 The same elevated view can therefore be understood as a gaze of management and surveillance or as a gaze that affirms attachment to place. Hokkaido’s history, however, cannot be reduced to a simple story of “developing nature.” Shimizu himself notes that Hokkaido was and remains part of Ainu cultural territory and cautions against explaining colonization solely as a conflict between nature and humanity.^*33 Matsue’s elevated photographs do not settle the view from above as neutral observation; they leave open the question of which histories are embedded in that position.

Photographing History Under the Same Conditions

JP-34 shows that a method recording the entire surface under consistent conditions does not automatically erase a place’s history. In the photographs made in Hiroshima, Matsue does not isolate only established monuments such as the Atomic Bomb Dome. Rivers, roads, residential districts, ports, and island topography receive the same precision. Nobuo Kuraishi’s essay “The Position of Surveying—Taiji Matsue’s Photography to the Present” appears in the Taiji Matsue Handbook, and the publisher’s introduction to JP-34 explains that looking at the contemporary surface from a distant position can produce an unexpected encounter with historical wounds.^*16

Here, the refusal to designate “historically important places” in advance becomes part of the method. Monuments and ordinary houses, traces of war and present-day infrastructure remain at the same resolution. Read afterward, history can therefore extend from a symbolic point to the larger question of how the contemporary city was formed. Matsue’s even photographic conditions prevent details from being discarded solely according to judgments of importance made at the moment of exposure, leaving traces available for later reading.^*16

Photography in the Digital Era

In 2010, Risaku Suzuki, Ryudai Takano, Taiji Matsue, Nobuo Kuraishi, and Minoru Shimizu began the group Shashin Bunriha, or Photography Secession. Against the contraction of the film market and the spread of digital cameras, it reopened the questions “What is photography?” and “Where do photography’s possibilities lie?”^*17 Matsue’s contemporaneous work with cell, moving images, digital processing of earlier negatives, and makieta can be understood as extending the unit of the photograph beyond a fixed final image toward a fragment within an image, continuous time, an earlier negative, and a model.

For Matsue, digitization did not lead primarily toward composites of scenes that never existed. He has said that he treats information recorded at the moment of exposure as the basis of the image and regards digital processing as an extension of darkroom work.^*1 At the same time, he developed cell, which turns a fragment of one photograph into another image; moving works that introduce continuous time into compositions close to still photographs; and makieta, which applies the same photographic form to actual places and models. Maintaining trust in what the camera recorded, these works repeatedly ask where one photograph begins and ends, whether it must remain still, and whether its subject must be an actual site.

International Reception

Internationally, the Fruitmarket Gallery exhibition Liquid Crystal Futures introduced Matsue in 1994 alongside Naoya Hatakeyama, Ryuji Miyamoto, Toshio Shibata, and others.^*28 Landscape as a Metaphor (2005) placed him within an international discussion of landscape that encompassed an earth measured by satellite technology, idealized nature, and industrialized land.^*37 In 2012, the Centre national des arts plastiques exhibition ATLAS approached his work through seriality, typology, and the landscape of postindustrial society after New Topographics.^*25

Matsue’s museum presence is likewise not confined to Japan. In Eye to Eye—Seeing, the Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo situated his “camera eye,” directed toward cities and the workings of nature around the world, among works that examine the act of seeing.^*14 SFMOMA also holds several works, including JP-22 08, and presents him within an international collection of contemporary photography.^*10

Matsue’s work cannot be reduced to the repetition of a single style of elevated photography. Its trajectory links travel and encounters with land, geography and satellite imagery, trust in the camera’s mechanical record, rules that suppress horizon and shadow, high resolution, geographic indexing, deliberate departures from those rules, and a digital reconsideration of the unit of the photograph. His statement that the lens preserves information beyond the photographer’s attention connects directly to cell, which extracts new photographs from within a single image; to moving works, which add duration to a still-photographic structure; and to makieta, which even removes the requirement that the subject be an actual landscape.^*1 At the center of his method is an effort to keep recorded detail available for later reading instead of making the photograph answer only to what seemed important at the moment of exposure. When memory, history, or time could no longer be addressed by that method alone, he altered the rules he had made.