moom bookshop

“Why are there pictures and photographs?
What is the language uttered by poets?
Whose eyes, whose voice?”

Just before the pandemic,
The darkest night in the world.
The photographer's body becomes a "void," concealing a forgotten voice like a storm.
And then, it quietly appears in front of us.

———

Since the 1990s, Takahashi has produced numerous portraits and landscapes, and his work has always appeared to us with an alternative gravitational pull that invites the viewer to look outside the hustle and bustle of the times and trends.
This work is a collection of photographs taken by Takahashi in France, mainly in Paris, which he visited for the first time in late autumn of 2019.

Paris has been the city that marked the beginning of modern photography, the capital of media and images, and the stage of "modern spectacle" such as the Olympics and the Expo, that has continued to make the world lust.
In other words, it is the city that gave birth to the gaze and structure of modernity, where we still gaze at each other today.
Scenes captured on film by Takahashi, who shifted his gaze from the vague wilderness to Paris, are the details with "no spectacle" --- fragments of the world in which further disconnection spread after the end of the millennium, which was too short to heal the wounds of modern history. It is also a time and space that we can never return to.
In those scenes, cut off by the guillotine-like shutter of the Hasselblad 1000F, the voices of whom our world has discarded and forgotten echo like a long-distance call in the midnight.

With over 200 pages of only new works, this is Takahashi's first attempt at a photo book in his long career.

＊The top side of the book is bound in a pouch, but this is not a binding error, but rather a specification to suit the concept of this book. The top is perforated, so please feel free to cut it with something like paper knife, or look through it without cutting.