Exhibitions 1
Slow Glass: New Work by Naoya Hatakeyama (Impressions Gallery, 29 Castlegate, York, till 3 August)
Raindrops keep falling. . .
Andrew Lambirth
Last year the award-winning Japanese photographer Naoya Hatakeyama underwent a four-month residency in Milton Keynes as part of the Japan 2001 Festival and Year of the Artist. I use the word 'underwent' with some deliberation. The only occasion on which I have visited Milton Keynes was in the company of the painter Maggi Hambling, and we traversed what seemed the entire length of the town on foot in search of the art gallery, walking down the central reservation of one of the grid roads, risking life and limb at every junction or roundabout. Milton Keynes is a town entirely devoted to the car, and we had made the mistake of trying to walk through its concrete purlieus. Any slight inclination towards melancholy in either of our personalities may be dated to that grey and rainy afternoon of pedestrian temerity.
It is thus deeply appropriate that Hatakeyama should have concentrated on depicting Milton Keynes seen through a car window in the rain. Well, that was his intention on first arriving in this (to him) unknown town in a land where it always rains. In fact, it did not rain much during the early summer last year, so Hatakeyama had to find another subject. He lighted upon the new housing estates in this new town, and photographed them from a height of three metres, thus making them appear slightly smaller and even more ridiculous than they are. This series of photographs — called 'Still Life' — is fairly ordinary, though beautifully lit and composed, the most impressive being a wide shot of houses in the distance from the other side of a lake or river.
Luckily, Hatakeyama was lent a Suzuki jeep by the Milton Keynes council, so he could get about Car Town without being run over, though the council logo on the vehicle's door did for some reason attract a certain amount of unwelcome attention. He seems to have enjoyed himself bombing about in the sunshire, all preconceptions of English weather subverted, listening to the car radio and nosing out sites of the genteel new brick-built vernacular architecture. Ah, but when it did finally rain, the streets were transformed and Hatakeyama was able to put his first plan into action — photographing the course of raindrops as if looking through a windscreen or window pane. The backdrop is the city at night, in and out of focus. Some features are just recognisable, such as a set of traffic-lights or a multistorey carpark, but in fact the more abstract the images, the more effective they are. The runs and clusters of water droplets, like polished pebbles of light, work well with the fragmented views of the town. Intensely coloured and almost abstract, these longexposure rain images — the Slow Glass aspect of the exhibition — are highly original and strangely beguiling.
I saw the show in Winchester, on the sec
ond leg of its three-venue tour. The large rain photographs are framed unobtrusively in grey-white wood, unglazed, the prints on foamboard and aluminium remaining exposed in all their fragility to the atmosphere. This has the effect of making them even more engaging and immediate. The images are not titled individually, but can be purchased for £3,000 each. The exhibition is accompanied by a handsomely illustrated book, priced at £12.50. Ironically, there are no plans to take the work to Milton Keynes itself. A shame really: Hatakeyama's raindrop photographs make the town seem quite beautiful.
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