Keizo Kitajima
Isolated Places (Signed)
Published by Rat Hole Gallery, 2012
Hardcover
96 pages
Size: 25.8 x 22 cm
After becoming known for his street photographs taken both inside and outside Japan from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, Keizo Kitajima embarked on two new bodies of work in 1992: his PORTRAITS... series and his PLACES series, which features landscapes devoid of human figures. For his early works in the PLACES series, most of the photographs were taken in major cities around the world, including Tokyo, London, New York, and Hong Kong. ...From the late 1990s onward, most of his works have been taken solely in Japan and, more recently, in small villages and isolated islands in the Japanese countryside. While the shift in his subject matter from urban to rural locations is at first glance a movement between polar opposites—global homogeneity versus vernacular disparities—Kitajima is more concerned with capturing "landscapes that have lost a name and a face." Such landscapes are found all over Japan, but they are rarely noticed. They are "isolated places" that have forgotten their past and lost sight of their future.
- Rat Hole Gallery, Tokyo.