Like the well-known and highly respected Japanese photographer Toshio Shibata, Tetsugo Hyakutake takes as his subject manmade structures found in the Japanese landscape. But unlike Toshio Shibata who celebrates the harmony of these manmade structures with nature, Tetsugo Hyakutake wishes to highlight the irony inherent in the Japanese industrial landscape. His photographs questions the “unspoken truth” that industrial and economic development go hand in hand with societal advancement, especially on an individual level. Japan’s rapid economic rise after the defeat of World War II perhaps came at the expense of traditional societal values.

The landscapes on view at the Alan Klotz Gallery at first seemed to highlight the geometric beauty of the industrial subjects. The brightly lit nocturnal views give you a sense of Japan as an alien wonderland. On closer inspection, the lack of people and wide-angle perspectives gives you a sense of being a trespasser, of being a stranger in a strange land. In these pictures the cold beauty of industrial form has displaced the warmth of human society. This fact is further heightened by the way the artist decides to title some of the photographs as “Industrial Still Life in Japan”. The title suggests both the formal beauty and elegance of a traditional still life and also the tragedy of stilled lives, the coldness of displacement that is all too often a result of government and industrial expansion.

The landscapes on view at the Alan Klotz Gallery at first seemed to highlight the geometric beauty of the industrial subjects. The brightly lit nocturnal views give you a sense of Japan as an alien wonderland. On closer inspection, the lack of people and wide-angle perspectives gives you a sense of being a trespasser, of being a stranger in a strange land. In these pictures the cold beauty of industrial form has displaced the warmth of human society. This fact is further heightened by the way the artist decides to title some of the photographs as “Industrial Still Life in Japan”. The title suggests both the formal beauty and elegance of a traditional still life and also the tragedy of stilled lives, the coldness of displacement that is all too often a result of government and industrial expansion.