Tokyo and my Daughter

The complete edition of Takashi Homma’s acclaimed homage reveals the connection between the graceful and intimate sequence of images depicting the girl – which is in fact not Takashi Homma’s daughter but the daughter of friends of his – and the city of Tokyo. The girl, captured in various stages of growing up in everyday locations, stares serenely just beyond the camera lens, unselfconscious and generally appearing more interested in the person holding the camera than the device itself: in one photograph, she peers out curiously from the backseat of a car, while in another she points her own tiny pink camera back at the photographer. Homma’s photography is imbued with a warmth and sincerity that belies his total familiarity with the subjects at hand; he documents Tokyo’s urban landscape with the same tenderness he brings to portraying the girl.

Takashi Homma’s photographs are said to have a special energy, lying in the detachment he can reach with the objects and people in front of his camera. In this new book, the Artist’s very personal subject still seems to make no compromise to the disconnected way he registers what he sees through his lense. At first sight the viewer could be brought into imagining that Homma may perceive his daughter as just being part of the Tokyo urban landscape as all the cars, houses and trees are… Or is she just ‘acting’ as one of them, being exposed to the staring eye of her everyday spectator – her father –, like Tokyo’s cars, houses and trees are to their inhabitants, she neither resist nor attempt to seduce the camera, but impassively returns his glances, even trying to become the spectator herself once.

Exhibitions at Utrecht and POST in Tokyo, June 22nd to July 18th, 2021