Art News

Landscapes that emerge from nature: Retrospective of the work of Naoya Hatakeyama at Huis Marseille

AMSTERDAM.- The stories told in Natural Stories – the retrospective of the work of the great Japanese photographer Naoya Hatakeyama – are about the relationships between humans and nature. Hatakeyama’s photographs do not tell stereotypical stories. He takes pictures not of plants or animals, but of stones and minerals, of the raw materials we exploit in order to give ourselves protection and warmth, of the nature we use in order to survive. Naoya Hatakeyama’s camera tells of the poetry of human industrial activity in factories, coal mines and quarries. Hatakeyama photographs landscapes that emerge out of a shared history with people. A part of nature may be either beautiful or ugly in itself, in Hatakeyama’s view, but the process of documenting it in a certain way turns it into ‘landscape’ – that is, a part of nature that has been ascribed a certain meaning. It is always people who turn nature into landscape; nature itself is indifferent t