An active quarry might be a mile long and half as wide and as deep as a zeppelin standing on end. It takes decades to engineer a hole so big, but decades are still only a fraction of the time it takes to make a rock: thousands, sometimes millions of years of pressure and submersion in water or slow cooling or intense heat. A rock is a petrifaction not only of minerals but of the earth’s dynamic process.
One protracted system undoes another: this is the operating principle of a quarry. Two monumental chronologies meet in a transitional moment that defines them both. The whole thing — the doing and the undoing, the advancement of the quarry and the attrition of the rock — depends on a string of instants: a blast; another blast; another blast.
In response to these layered temporalities, the artist Naoya Hatakeyama developed his own. Since 1995, Hatakeyama has produced 39 photographs of four different quarry sites in Japan for his series Blast. With the assistance of an explosives expert, who is able to predict the direction in which atomized matter will fly, and a remote-control camera, Hatakeyama documents the moment of fracture at close range.
In an earlier series, Lime Works, for which he was awarded the 22nd Kimura Ihei Memorial Photography Award in 1997, Hatakeyama photographed Japan’s limestone quarries as one might the pyramids at Giza: some images convey the magnitude of the entire setup from an aerial perspective; others, especially those that depict the quarries’ industrial structures, seem almost three-dimensional in their angular intricacy. The Blast series presents a polar approach: the sense of place is so abstracted that many pictures could reasonably be mistaken for images of meteorites striking the surface of Mars.
In Blast #13609 (2007), white, cloudlike pillars shoot at an acute angle from the base of a rock face. Further from the lens, where the rock turns burnt orange, smaller smoke pillars erupt. Blast #09420 (2007) is pure atomization. The sky is pale and overcast — in Blast #13609 it is cerulean — and there is no rock face, only two or three apparent points of disruption and airborne particles, from boulders to shards to dust.
One controlled act captures another: this is the operating principle of the Blast series. But control as it pertains to nature is complicated; the idea of complete control, we are shown time and again, is illusory. Hatakeyama understands this deeply. On March 11, 2011, the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, which precipitated the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear crisis, effectively razed Rikuzentakata, Hatakeyama’s home city. He lost his mother, the house he grew up in, much of his community and the landscape of his childhood.
Hatakeyama returned to Rikuzentakata just days after the disaster. In the following months, he photographed the collapsed architecture and devastated surroundings — his city rendered temporarily unfamiliar. The result, a series of 60 images titled Rikuzentakata, was exhibited in 2012 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as part of Hatakeyama’s retrospective, Natural Stories.
Natural Stories contained photographs from the Blast, Lime Hills and Rikuzentakata series, among others, as well as a video installation, Twenty-Four Blasts (2011), formed from a sequence of still photographs from Blast. The video signifies a poetic arc from the dynamism of explosions to the stasis of photographs to the controlled motion of digital video. To say that this arc progresses would be too prescriptive as ‘progress’ implies a single, forward direction. The transfiguration of movement from blast to Blast to Twenty-Four Blasts is not so much progress as a sort of continuity.
If Twenty-Four Blasts and the Blast photographs capture force itself, evinced by matter instantaneously displaced, the Rikuzentakata pictures show force as a specter, recognizable only through inference — by the negation and stillness it leaves in its wake. Blast concerns the moment of transition, Rikuzentakata its aftermath. Both express the power of an instant to radically reconfigure the age-old and familiar.
The finality of natural disaster and the diminution of limited natural resources seem to confirm that history is a linear timeline comprised of irrevocable markers. This is one way to think of moments of rupture: points of no return. But the Blast and Rikuzentakata series demand a more complex theory.
In a letter to his friend Albert Oeri dated January 4th 1959, Carl Jung wrote: “When something happens here at point A which touches upon or affects the collective unconscious, it has happened everywhere.” In Hatakeyama’s works, rupture does not indicate that we are hurtling towards an inevitable future. Extrapolating from Jung, the instants suspended in Blast and Rikuzentakata are not only simultaneous but un-beginning and un-ending: they have happened always.
Can you please describe what awe feels like for you?
「畏怖 (awe)」とは、対象から普通ではない力が感じられて、そのそばに寄ることができない、といった感情のことで、基本的には恐怖の一つなのですが、この恐怖には、対象への尊敬が入り交じっています。恐怖と尊敬という、普段は両立しない感情が併存するというこの特別な事態は、それに気付いた人間を驚かせ、同時にその人に内省を迫ります。ですから人は、その恐怖から「逃げ出す」ことより、その恐怖と共に「立ち尽くす」ことを選ぶのです。この相反感情併存の経験は、ロマン主義以降の近代芸術が扱う重要な主題の一つでもあります。
Awe is the emotion that arises from feeling an unusual power from an object—and being unable to approach it. Basically, it is a type of fear, but this fear is mixed with reverence for the object. The coexistence of the normally incompatible emotions of fear and reverence is an exceptional situation; it provokes surprise, and pushes the person who perceives it towards self-reflection. This is why, rather than running away from this fear, people choose to stand paralyzed in front of it. Indeed, the simultaneous experience of such contradictory emotions is one of the important themes of modern art since Romanticism.
I watched a video on YouTube where you mention the feeling of isolation as part of experiencing awe. How does this relate to your work as a photographer?
もし「対象から感じる普通ではない力」のそばに近寄り過ぎて、その力に巻き込まれてしまうなら、恐怖と尊敬のバランスは崩れ、「畏怖」はたちまち雲散霧消してしまうことでしょう。つまり「畏怖」を失わないためには、「力のそばに寄りすぎず、力との距離を保つ」ことが肝心なのです。このことは、写真を撮影する時の私たちの態度を、どこかで連想させます。以下に、その理由を考えてみます。
If one gets too close to this “unusual power,” one becomes enveloped in it, and the balance between fear and respect is destroyed—here, “awe” vanishes like mist. In other words, in order to not lose “awe,” it is essential to not get too close to that power and to maintain one’s distance from it. In some way, this is suggestive of our attitude when we photograph. I will think a bit more about this reason below.
「写真を撮ろう」という決心とは、「カメラの後ろにまわろう」という決心のことです。たとえ楽しいパーティーの最中でも、撮影者は一人だけ、仲間の輪から外れなければなりませんし、目の前の風景がいくら魅力的であっても、撮影者はその中にうっとりと浸っているわけにはゆかず、すすんでその外側に立ち、風景に対して一つのフレームを与えなければなりません。目の前の光景の魅力を保存し、人と分かち合うためには、逆説的に、その光景の外に出てゆかなければならない。つまり肉体を、イメージから切り離さなければならない。撮影者とはこのように、自らすすんで孤独を選び取る者のことだと言えます。もちろんこの場合の「孤独」とは、社会的なレベルでの「孤独」ではなく、もっと個人的な、言ってみれば内面的なレベルでの「孤独」のことです。コメント
Resolving to “take a photograph,” this is the same as resolving to “go behind the camera.” For example, even in the middle of an enjoyable party, a photographer must separate from the group. No matter how compelling the scene in front of her eyes may be, she cannot allow herself to be enthralled by the scene. Paradoxically, in order to preserve and share its attractive qualities, she must voluntarily stand outside of it and give it a single frame. In other words, the body must be detached from the image. In this way, photographers can be called people who voluntarily choose isolation for themselves. Of course this “isolation” is not a societal kind of “isolation” but rather a more personal, as it were introspective one.
撮影行為が習慣化してしまった人間、つまり写真家とは、このような「孤独=isolation」を、意識的にしろ無意識的にしろ、身につけてしまった人であると言えます。そのような人にとって、魅力的な光景に直面しながら、そこからいかにして物理的、心理的な距離を確保するかといったことは、撮影における、いち作法と呼んでもかまわないものになっているはずです。「そばに寄りすぎず、力との距離を保つ」などといったことは、撮影者として馴染みのある行動のはずであり、そのような人々のうち、意識の高い者なら、撮影行為を通じて、さまざまなものごとから「畏怖」を積極的に体験したり、あるいは自らの写真表現を通じて、「畏怖」を新しく創出し、他の人に分配することさえ、可能になるかもしれません。
We could say that a person who is accustomed to the act of shooting, in other words a photographer, is someone who, whether consciously or unconsciously, is familiar with such isolation. For this kind of person, the physical or psychological distance they secure for themselves while confronting a compelling scene could be called a kind of courtesy. “Not drawing close, maintaining a distance from power” is a behavior familiar to photographers, and among such people, those with a high degree of consciousness will, through the act of shooting, actively experience “awe” through various things. Their own photographic expression includes the possibility of creating a new sense of “awe”—and, perhaps, even the possibility of transmitting this impression to another person.
ご質問における「畏怖」と「孤独」および「写真家」の、それぞれの概念を繋げることは、以上のように示すことができると思います。そしてこの回路の中にも、ロマン主義以降の近代芸術家像の一つの典型が、浮かび上がっているような気がします。付け加えれば、主体と対象間における、物理的および心理的距離の問題は、いわゆる客観性や中立性、観察そして傍観さらに不参加といった、倫理や政治の話に、そのまま繋がってゆく傾向があり、撮影者を常に悩ませているものでもあります。
I think that the concepts which you have mentioned in your question—“awe,” “isolation,” “photographer”—can be connected in the way I have indicated above. Within this line of thinking, I feel that the image of typical modern artists since Romanticism rises to the surface. To go further, the problem of physical and psychological distance with respect to the subject and object relates to discussions of so-called objectivity or neutrality; active and passive observation, as well as nonparticipation; and finally ethics and politics. Photographers are always vexed by the tendency to link these discussions together.
I recently read that in Carrara, Italy, the marble quarry workers describe the stone in an anthropomorphised way (the marble is said to be “asleep,” “awake,” “singing,” and so on). The workers also describe the act of quarrying as a reciprocal exchange the marble is a dynamic, living thing that participates in the process. Do you relate to natural material in this way? Does this inform the way you photograph landscape and even the limestone in the Blast series?
岩石は、青銅や鉄のような金属と比べた場合、固くて重いという共通点はありますが、非常に脆（もろ）く、曲げたり延ばしたりすることができません。力を加えた場合、どのように割れるかを予見することも難しく、また、望む形を作るためには、削るしかありません。岩石は、金属ほど人の自由にならないので、それに接する時、人の心には「うまくゆきますように」といった気持ちが常に生じます。これは「祈り」と言い換えられます。思い通りに岩石が割れてくれたら、人は「祈り」が岩石に通じたと思うことでしょう。これは「対話」と言い換えられます。人類は、金属を用い始める以前の数十万年という時間を、岩石を手に過ごしてきたのですから、岩石に「対話的」に接する習慣が、現代まで生き延びていても、ぜんぜん不思議ではありません。日本でも、石垣を組む職人などが、今でもよく「石の声を聞く」などと言うことがあるのです。このような「対話」は、岩石などの素材に限らず、動植物や地形、気象などの、いわゆる「自然」すべてとの間にも、永きに亘って交わされてきたはずです。
Like copper, iron or other metals, rocks are hard and heavy, but they are very brittle, so they cannot be bent or extended. When applying force to rocks, it’s very difficult to predict how they will break apart; the only way to make a rock take on a desired form is to shave it down. Rocks do not conform to the human will like metal, and a feeling like “I hope this goes well” often emerges when working with them; this feeling could be called a “prayer” instead. If the rock breaks apart in the desired way, then the “prayer” reached the rock; we could call this a “conversation.” Humans worked on rocks with their hands for hundreds of thousands of years before working with metal, so it is not strange that the custom of referring to a “conversational” relation to rocks has continued until the present day. Even now in Japan, people who construct stone walls and the like still often say things like “listen to the voice of the rock.” This kind of “conversation” is not limited to natural materials like rocks, but extends to plants, animals, terrain, the weather—in short, everything under the heading of what we call “nature.” This conversation has been carried on for ages.
ところで、カラーラの石工たちが、岩石を「擬人化している」と指摘することに、僕は懐疑的です。岩がしゃべったり、あるいは寝たりしていると、彼らが感じる時、それは「擬人化」でもなんでもなく、彼らにとっては事実にほかならないのだと思います。でもそれを外側から眺めることしかできない人（近代的人間）は、それが本当に事実なのか、あるいはただのレトリックなのか、区別がつけられません。「神話」や「宗教」といった言葉と同じように、「擬人化」とは、そのような者たちが便利に用いる言葉なのではないでしょうか。事実でもレトリックでも、どちらの場合に用いても、誤りのない言葉なのですから。
In any event, I am skeptical about the idea that the quarry workers in Carrara refer to rocks in “an anthropomorphized way.” If they feel that rocks are speaking or sleeping, this is nothing like “anthropomorphication.” I think for them this is nothing other than an actual fact. But for someone who can only look on from outside (a modern person), it is impossible to distinguish whether this is an actual fact or mere rhetoric. In either case, though, the word “anthropomorphosis” is correct, and this is why modern people can use this word—as well as words like “myth” and “religion”—so lightly.
生命のないものに話しかけたり、その声を聞いたりといった、科学時代の人間からすれば奇妙に感じられる心性を、もし「擬人化」と呼ぶなら、死者や過去に話しかけたり、その声を聞いたりといったことも「擬人化」と呼ばざるを得なくなってくるでしょう。でもこれは、僕たちの生活実感からすると、ナンセンスです。僕たちはいつも、死者や過去に対して語りかけることを止めないし、彼らからの声を必死になって、いつも聞こうとしているのですから。僕たちにとって「精神」とか「魂」とか「心」という原始的な言葉が、今でも必要とされることには、論理的な理由があると思うのです。
If we call the disposition of speaking to a lifeless thing or hearing its voice—things that, to a person of the scientific age, seems strange—“anthropomorphosis,” then we must also call speaking to dead people or the past, or hearing their voices, “anthropomorphosis” as well. But, from the perspective of our actual experience, this is nonsense: we can never stop talking to dead people or the past, because we are always desperate to listen to them. I think there is a logical reason for why primitive words like “spirit,” “soul” and “heart” are still essential to us.
僕は確かに岩石の写真を撮りますが、僕は石工ではなく写真家なのです。ですから、僕にとっての素材（natural material）は、石ではなく、フィルムや印画紙、カメラといったものです。（それらに「光」とか「イメージ」という、素材と呼べるかどうか危ういものを、つけ加える必要があるかもしれません。） 僕は、石工たちが石に対して「asleep」「awake」「singing」などと述べる時の気持ちを、自身の写真の経験から類推するようにして、想像することができます。しかしながら、このような語彙を、彼らのように、こと「石」という素材に対して実際に用いることは、僕には無理です。ひとつの素材との間に、対話関係を築くのには、時間が必要なのです。
While I certainly take photographs of rocks, I am a photographer and not a quarry worker. So, for me, my “natural material” is not stone but rather film, photographic paper and cameras. (It is dangerous to call “light” and “images” material, but perhaps it is necessary to add them to this list.) Through the experience of my own photographs, I can imagine what the quarry workers feel when they say that the rock is “asleep,” “awake” or “singing.” However, it is impossible for me to use these words in the same way that they do with respect to stones. It takes time to form a communicative bond with a material.
Also, in Carrara, there is marble dust in the air and drinking water so the workers ingest the marble as they quarry it. How much do you believe humans are transformed by their environment, whether on a psychological or physical level?
水泳選手は水中での体型が魚に似てくる。毎日塑像に励む彫刻家の指は、永い間に
コテやヘラのように平たくなる。でも、岩石が、石切場で働く人をどのように変形させるのか、僕は寡聞にして知りません。その変形についての報告が、まず聞きたいところです。
A swimmer comes to look like a fish when they are in the water. The fingers of a sculptor who works every day to mold their work will, after a long time, flatten out like a trowel or a spatula. But I do not have even the slightest bit of information about how someone working at a quarry might be transformed. I would first like to hear more from you about such a transformation.
永い間写真を撮っている人が、目とか腕とかが変形したなんて話は聞いたことがありま せん。（僕の場合は、永くカメラバッグを左肩にかけて仕事していたため、真っ直ぐに 立つと、左肩が右肩よりも上がっていますけれど…。）普通の人より、ものの見えに対する意識が高くなった、つまり目がよくなった、とか、暗室の薬品のせいで、指が黒くなったとか病気になったとか、そんなことは時々聞きますけれども。
I have never heard about the fingers or arms of someone who has taken photographs for a long time being transformed. (In my case, after wearing a camera bag over my left shoulder for a long time, it will be somewhat higher than my right when I stand up straight…) I do, however, sometimes hear that someone’s consciousness with respect to looking at things is higher than that of a normal person—in other words, their eye got better—or that someone got sick, or their fingers turned black, from darkroom chemicals.
水泳選手や彫刻家における変形の場合のような、いわゆる獲得形質は、遺伝しないと 言われますが、たとえば日本人の平均身長が伸びていることや、顔の輪郭が変わってきていること、アレルギー人口が増えていることなどは、都市という環境が、遺伝的なレベルで人間を変形させていると考えていいのかもしれません。それから、環境が作用しての人間心理の「変形」に関しては、「都市生活によるストレス」なんて、つまらない言葉しか、僕の頭には浮かびません。僕などよりも、社会学、民俗学、心理学、歴史学などの分野を尋ねた方が、印象的な例証がたくさん出てくると思います。W
The so-called acquired characteristics of the swimmer and the sculptor are not said to be passed down, but if, for example, the average height of the population of Japan increases, the shape of people’s profiles changes, or the number of people with allergies increases, it would be possible to think that the environment of the city is functioning in a hereditary way. In regards to the psychological transformations created by cities, nothing but boring words like “stress brought on by urban life” come into my head. Rather than someone like me, I think that inquiring into the field of societal studies, folklore, psychology or history will lead to more impressive examples.
When humans enact huge changes on their physical environment, do you see this as violent or necessary behavior? or both?
この質問への答えは、僕たちの「時間の幅」を、どれほどのものにするかによって、変わってくると思います。たとえば、物質的困窮の渦中にあったり、逆に物質的快楽に浸 っている最中の者にとっての「時間の幅」は、いまとか今日とかの、短期的なものです。そして、物質に対する欲求がある程度充足され、その結果欲望が抑制され、その状態の快さを維持したいと願う者にとっての「時間の幅」は、子供や他地域の住民の時間まで含めた、たとえば数年、数十年単位の、中期的なものでしょう。また、突然の天災や戦争などに見舞われたせいで、物質環境に対する考えが激変してしまった者にとっての「時間の幅」は、一挙に数百年、数千年といった、長期的なものに変わります。
I think that the answer to this question will change depending on the way that we perceive the “breadth” of time. For example, for someone caught up in a vortex of poverty, or someone caught up in material pleasures, the “breadth” of time will correspond to “now,” “today” or some other short period. For someone whose material desires are more or less satisfied, this avarice is controlled, and this person will want to preserve the comfort of this condition. Taking into account their children or people in other regions, this person will perceive the “breadth” of time in the middle-term units of years or decades. Finally, such thoughts of the material world are violently changed for someone affected by a sudden natural disaster or a war; here, in a single stroke, the “breadth” of time will acquire the long-term unit of hundreds or thousands of years.
短期的な「時間の幅」の中で暮らすものにとっては「必要」なことが、中期的な「時間の幅」の中で暮らすものにとっては「暴力的」となり、そしてそれらがすべて、世の「無常」であると、長期的な「時間の幅」に暮らすものには感じられます。じっさい、一人の人間の中には、上に述べた三種類の「時間の幅」が、混在していることが多いので、そのことが、この質問に答えることを難しくしています。
The things that the person with the “short” perception of time consider “necessary” will appear “violent” to the person with the “middle” perception of time. All of these things, in turn, will appear transient to the person with the “long” view. In reality, all these perceptions of time exist together within individuals, and this makes it difficult for me to answer this question.
「violent」か「necessary」かは、英国伝統の功利主義倫理学における「快苦」の議論に、直接繋がるものでしょう。自分にとっての快苦と、自分以外の者にとっての快苦をどう調停するかは、現実の民主主義政治にとっての、最大の課題でもあります。現代の 錚々たる国家の指導者たちでさえ四苦八苦している難問に対して、一個人がなかなか上手い答を用意できなくとも、それは当然だろうと思います。ただし、考えることや発言することを諦めてしまっては、人間としてこの世に生きている甲斐がありません。芸術の存在意義は、そのこと（「諦めないで！」）を人に教える点にあると信じています。
Whether something is “violent” or “necessary” is directly connected to the “greatest happiness” principle within the English tradition of utilitarian ethics. One’s own greatest happiness, and how to mediate the greatest happiness of others, is the greatest task of actual democratic politics. Even today’s prominent political leaders are struggling to work on these difficult problems, and it’s natural that individuals have difficulty preparing sufficient answers themselves. However, there is no point in living in this world if we give up thinking and speaking. I believe that the significance of art lies in showing this (“don’t give up!”) to people.
Can you describe the environment or landscape that has had the biggest impact on you, and on your work?
子供の頃なら、馴染みの川の上流にあった、鉄道トンネルの入り口付近の、コンクリートの巨大な壁。最近なら、大津波の後の故郷。
In my childhood, it was the extremely large concrete wall near the entrance of a railroad tunnel at the headwaters of a river I often visited. More recently, my hometown after the tsunami.
Even when the subject of your work is seemingly unapproachable or immense (a mountain, a vast landscape) the photographs always feel like the record of a close experience or encounter. Do you aim to photograph your experience, or do you experience through the act of photographing?
両方です。
I do both.
What makes stone stone? Does it cease to be stone once it has been exploded and quarried? Why or why not?
僕が「Blast」の撮影のために、よく撮影に訪れる鉱山企業で「三菱マテリアル」という名前の会社があります。日本の会社なのに「マテリアル」と、カタカナで書くのです。石も金属も扱っているので「マテリアル」が相応しいのでしょうが、僕は撮影のたびに、この「マテリアル」という言葉が「マター」から来ているという事実を、思い出すのです。
To shoot “Blast,” I often visited the quarries of a company called “Mitsubishi Material.” Although this is a Japanese company, the word “material” is not written using a Japanese word but rather a Japanese phoneticization of the English word itself. It is an appropriate word because the company deals with both stone and metal, but each time I visited I was reminded of the fact that this word derives from the word “matter.”
名詞の場合、「matter」は、ある空間を占有する物体／物質という単純なニュアンスであるのに対して、「material」には、あるものが作られる原料となる物質といったニュアンスがあります。発破という、自然への人為的な働きかけによって、石は「matter」としての石から「material」としての石へと、その意味を変化させていると、ひとまずは言えるのではないでしょうか。大げさかもしれませんが、「石灰石を破砕する瞬間とは、言い換えれば、自然が都市へと変わる瞬間のことだ」と、僕は、最近出版した「Blast」のあとがきに書きました。
When used as a noun, “matter” has the simple meaning of referring to a body or substance that occupies a space, while “material” refers to a substance from which something can be made. Before anything else, we could say that an explosion—a human approach to nature—changes stone from “matter” to “material.” It might be an exaggeration, but in the afterword to Blast, I wrote: “The moment when limestone is burst apart could instead be called the moment when nature changes into the city.”
「石を石にしているものは何か？」というご質問は、「石の本質とは何か？」という質問に言い換えられるでしょう。確かに、機能や有用性の議論から解放されて、事物の本質を尋ねることは、他ならぬ「人間」だけに可能な行為で、多くの哲学者がこの問題にこぞって挑んでいるのも、無理からぬことなのですが、何度も繰り返すように、僕は写真家なのです。写真というメディウムの一番の美徳は、「ものごとは本質だけに還元できるものではない」と、人に教え諭すところにあると、僕は思っているのです。
The question, “what makes stone stone?” could be re-stated: “what is the essence of stone?” Certainly, casting aside discussions of function or use, asking about the essence of a thing is something that only humans can do; it is understandable that many philosophers have flocked to answer this question, but—to repeat—I am a photographer. I think the foremost virtue of photography is that it shows people that a thing cannot be reduced to its essence.
ご質問への回答と呼ぶには程遠いかもしれませんが、「石」という言葉で思い出したので、だいぶ前に「underground」という、僕の本のあとがきのために書いた文章を、最後に引用しておきます。
It might be far from your question, but the word “stone” reminded me of the afterword to my book from many years ago, Underground, which I will quote from here: The most exciting moment is when I find the picture that I want to do next. Luckily, I have spent my time walking from one place to the next, guided by my pictures. It’s like kicking a stone and chasing it. When I made my first kick at a limestone quarry, I never imagined that I would eventually be led to the underground environment of Tokyo. I’ll probably keep kicking my stone, just as I did as a schoolboy on my way home, but this time with no direction. I move forward guided only by the stone I’m kicking. And as I encounter unexpected scenes, so the stone becomes more and more precious to me.