The complete edition of Takashi Homma's acclaimed homage.
Tokyo and my Daughter 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.
New augmented edition of the book first published in 2006 (ISBN 978-3-905714-10-4).
Takashi Homma (born 1962, lives and works in Tokyo) is one of the most internationally recognised Japanese photographers active at the front lines of contemporary photography today. Homma's photography, possessing a uniquely cool gaze that rejects any sentimentality and portrays its subject with a characteristic sense of distance and cool tonality, has received acclaim not only in the world of photography but also contemporary art. Homma, who started out in advertising and fashion magazines in the late 1980s, moved to London in the early 90s taking work for legendary cultural magazines like i-D, and came to know there a few photographers who produced their own works by diverse methods. Upon his return to Japan, while making magazine media his foundation as a photographer representative of the 90s, his own photographic works capturing the landscape and people of Tokyo's suburbs were published together in Tokyo Suburbia which was awarded the Kimura Ihei Commemorative Photography Award in 1999. Since then, he has continued to exhibit his innovative work both overseas and domestically and attracted subsequent generations of photographers.
