Blast (#0608)

Writing recently in the Japanese photography journal IMA, writer Dan Abbe called Naoya Hatakeyama “one of the most cerebral Japanese photographers working today.” Blast is from his first project, which addressed limestone quarries around Japan, capturing in photography and video detonation and other excavation procedures that permit the extraction of limestone. Further projects have dealt with coal waste in France and the network of service tunnels in Tokyo—manifestations of a destructive human systematization of the natural landscape.

This explosive image makes literal the impact of human behavior on the natural world. Hatakeyama began the Blast series in 1995 as an extension of an earlier project documenting limestone quarries and processing factories across Japan. The raw stuff of the built environment, limestone is the main ingredient in cement as well as Japan’s most plentiful mineral resource. As Hatakeyama describes it, “the quarries and the cities are like negative and positive images of a single photograph.” As in this photograph, detonating dynamite to extract limestone works like the shutter release of a camera, the moment of capture.