Exhibition coinciding with the publication Takeshi Yamagishi’s Tokyo Pandemic
Chapter 2: November 8, 2021~
* Mon-Fri 11:00-17:00 (Closed Sat, Sun, Holidays)
Tokyo Little House / 3-6-12 Akasaka, Minato, Tokyo
*The exhibition period may be changed depending on circumstances. Please check Facebook for the latest information.
*Please order a drink at the cafe
*Entry may be limited during crowded times.
Tokyo Little House is pleased to host a joint photography exhibition to coincide with the publication of Takeshi Yamagishi’s Tokyo Pandemic, featuring images from Yamagishi’s Tokyo ru(i)ns series and Yoichi Sato’s Tokyo Year Zero project.
Tokyo Little House is a tourist space and hotel located in a house built more than seven decades ago in Akasaka, Tokyo. Having watched over the ever-changing city of Tokyo as it emerged from the darkness of ashes into the glow of neon lights, the house was renovated in 2018 into a one-room hotel upstairs, and a café and gallery on the ground.
The café was designed with an exhibition space open to the city, and since its foundation has hosted the Tokyo Year Zero project, featuring photographs of the scenery of Tokyo in 1945 gathered by Yoichi Sato as part of his research into the occupation of Tokyo after the end of the Pacific War.
Rubble stretched to the horizon beneath a large sky, broken only by a few stands of trees and the burned-out skeletons of buildings. So different is this scenery from the Tokyo we know today that it can be challenging to draw connections between the two. More than a few visitors have commented that the scenery reminded them of the coast of Tohoku after the tsunami.
Takeshi Yamagishi began taking photographs of the coast of Tohoku immediately after the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami in 2011. These photographs offer a detailed view of the destruction that ensued from the confrontation between the man-made world and nature. Yamagishi says that this experience of photographing Tohoku became the basis for his images of Tokyo.
How does the scenery of Tokyo appear when seen, we might say, looking back through Tohoku? How does this scenery intersect with the landscape of Tokyo 70-some years ago? The photographs of Tokyo Year Zero and Tokyo ru(i)ns are an opportunity to ponder how we can evoke the landscape of this city as it confronts a pandemic and awaits the Olympics.
(April 2021)
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Takeshi Yamagishi｜Photographer. Born in Yokohama in 1976, lives in Kawasaki. Graduated from Waseda University, School of Political Science & Economics and School of Art & Architecture. Yamagishi pursues architectural photography that addresses the power dynamics of architecture as a manifestation of artificiality in confrontation with nature. Solo exhibitions include Tohoku—Lost, Left, Found (2014, Konica Minolta Gallery). His photographs are collected in Tohoku Lost, Left, Found (LIXIL Publishing, 2019) and Tokyo Pandemic (Waseda University Press, 2021).
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Yoichi Sato｜Born in Tokyo in 1966, Sato is an urban historian and professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Waseda University. The author of numerous books on urban history and occupation-era Tokyo, he began the Tokyo Year Zero project in 2014.