For a long time, Takano Ryudai was a distant and unrelatable figure to me.

To begin with, while I could understand both the intention and the calculation behind his early offerings, typified by In My Room (2005) and How to Contact a Man (2009), they were of little interest, because although their theme seemed to be that of male sex and sexuality, I failed to find in them anything either specifically “gay” or “erotic.” Assuming this to be true, what connection do these two things absent from Takano’s photography have to photography more generally.

Eyes trace the curve of a big, strong chest, a strapping frame straining at a shirt. Being “gay” means never overlooking the superficially erotic. Yet on reaching the very heart of eros, transported on a storm of desire—the urge to see, to touch—one finds eros becalmed, as if at the eye of a that storm. Eros simultaneously gives of and destroys itself.^*1 Tirelessly seductive, truly savoring it, means stopping on the brink of it.

In the best “gay” art this exquisite balancing act of “off-centeredness” is always evident. Think of the work of Wilhelm von Gloeden, Minor White, Duane Michals, or George Platt Lynes: delicate, vulnerable, occasionally almost cringeworthy in the transparency of its desire. Conversely, what makes much so-called erotic art (Tom of Finland, Tagame Gengoro), and the masculine beauty of male nudes (Bruce Weber, Herb Ritts) so banal is their jettisoning of that balance. Eros will remain elusive as long as one aims for the heart of desire purely by pursuing muscle and pretty boys.

Moreover, this centrifugal force peculiar to gay-style eroticism also manifests as a force leaping from one object to the next, different one, via superficial sensation.

Mario’s voice was large and thick like his hands—except that it carried no sparkle. It struck Querelle slap in the face. It was a brutal, callous voice, like a big shovel.^*2

Here is that leap, in this case from brutal voice (hearing) to calloused, beefy hand (touch). For example, when we refer to Herbert Tobias, Robert Mapplethorpe and Wolfgang Tillmans as gay photographers, the core characteristic of their expression is this centrifugal force that jumps from subject to subject, with a certain superficial textural quality acting as an “equal” sign between.

Off-centered balance, or leap occasioned by surface eroticism: the name of Takano Ryudai will probably never be listed alongside those above. Takano’s theme is the politics around gender, so fundamentally, his subjects are offered up as identity politics specimens, meaning that their poses—contrapposto, lips slightly parted, odalisque, Olympia—are never anything but standard. Meaning also, on the other hand, that in those works of his not in a “gender” vein, possessing no appropriated formality, there is nothing of obvious interest either technically, or aesthetically.

Actually it was with Kasubaba (2011) that the chilling thought struck me: what if this “nothing-to-see-here” quality is exactly where Takano Ryudai’s talent lies? Oddly, the gravitational center of this exhibition lies in the unfolding of Takano’s work since Kasubaba, i.e. from “Daily Photographs” to his black and white shadow series, and latest work in photograms and salt prints. In contrast to modern landscape photography, grounded in an absorptive mode by which it emerges from an overlapping of the viewpoints of photographer and viewer with “the viewing angle of nobody,” that is, the camera eye; post-modern photography, as seen for example in the work of Stephen Shore, prompts awareness of another viewpoint, extracted in reverse via perspectival composition from the side of the world being photographed, thus offering an alternative way of looking at photos to that of “the viewing angle of nobody.”^*3 The whole of Takano Ryudai’s Kasubaba captures places where the manifestation of this alternative subjectivity (viewpoint) is hindered, and it is this which made him uncomfortable.

Analyzing Kasubaba it seemed to me that the artist seeking subjectivity à la Shore (subjectivity that arises from the world looking back at the beholder), feels irritated by Japanese landscapes that inevitably let him down in this regard. Yet observing how Takano’s work unfolded after the exhibition of black and white photos the following year, it appears in fact the very opposite is true. What discomfited the artist was that the thing he was seeking had materialized of its own accord right in front of him. That is to say, for Takano, Kasubaba represents the quest for a photographic zero of sorts, a mapping of the world lacking both subject and viewpoint. When he liberated photography from subject and viewpoint, i.e. from the focus of perspective and focal point of the lens, what appeared was shadow.

The most fundamental principle of photography is the pinhole phenomenon, whereby light passing through a tiny hole creates an inverted image. Light emitted by the subject forms an image after passing through a small hole, the size of the hole forming an image by becoming a pixel, as it were. If the hole is small, i.e. if the pixel is small, the image will be sharp, but if the hole is large, that is if the pixel is large, the image will be blurry. The “focus” of a pinhole camera image depends on the density of the points of light. As well, because the light forms an image on the surface it lands on, images form not only on the surface directly facing the hole, but also on the walls to the left or right or on the floor or ceiling. And because there are no limits when it comes to natural phenomena, regardless of whether the hole is small (sharp image) or large (blurry image), the pinhole phenomenon will still occur. In other words, even if the hole is the size of a window or doorway, an inverted image of the world outside the house actually appears; it is just that the image is blurred to such an extreme that it cannot be seen by the human eye as an “image.” The interiors of spaces with entrances that admit light are continually filled with images of the outside world.

Perspective was a concept that involved drawing together these images—which in the sense that they fill space could be called three-dimensional—on a single surface facing the hole through which the light passes. Lenses were inserted into pinholes and screens set up in accordance with the focal distance. The camera obscura was a device that underpinned what Roland Barthes called the “dioptric arts.”^*4

What Kasubaba explored was the removal of subject, viewpoint and focal point. One could say that by doing this, the photographer stepped outside the photograph as a “dioptric” plane. By his shadow series, Takano’s work had already lost any distinction between top and bottom, left and right. The world is none other than a camera/room with a giant aperture, suffused with an image of gigantic blurry light. For Takano, photography is about a single entity casting a shadow there. In the shaded part, images of the world cannot be seen. One could in fact say that this is the “subject” in Takano Ryudai’s photographs. A photographer is someone who obstructs light, and casts shadows on the world.

*１ Jean Genet, The Thief’s Journal, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Grove Press, 1973), 203.
A modified citation; the original reads: “The foreshortening preferred by the symbol when borne by that which it signifies gives and destroys the signification and the thing signified.”

*２ Jean Genet, Querelle, trans. Anselm Hollo (New York: Grove Press, 1974), 29.
*３ For further information, see Shimizu Minoru, “Analysis of Kasubaba: Variations on the themes of absorption and theatricality,” in Takano Ryudai, Kasubaba (Hiroshima: Daiwa Press, 2011).
*４ Roland Barthes, “Diderot. Brecht, Eisenstein,” in Image Music Text, essays selected and trans. Stephen Heath (London: Fontana Press, 1977), 69–70.


Shimizu Minoru
Critic. Professor, Doshisha University.

※Takano Ryudai “Daily Photographs 1999–2021” is being held at the National Museum of Art, Osaka through September 23, 2021.