What would happen if we were to remove the lights, a proof of civilisation, from the crossing that is symbolic of the city?
The "Crossing Ray" series is an experimental attempt to get close to the essence of the city by taking the light emitted by buildings from intersections to the limit and projecting its shape.
As a method of stealing light, I mainly took the lights from crossings in four directions of Tokyo, compared the four cuts with one another to merge them into a single piece. The motivation of this work comes from the experience of losing light to the city due to a planned power outage associated with the 3.11 nuclear power plant accident.
It has been hundred plus years since electric power has been put to practical use. Is the issue of power generation technology a question that should now be reconsidered?
Metropolitan Central Wholesale Market Tsukiji-shijo, the so-called "Tsukiji Jonai," closed its gates after 83 years on October 6, 2018.
This is a series of photographs of "Tsukiji Jonai" taken about two years before its relocation.
Although the market had to be relocated to Toyosu because it was considered "old, cramped, and dangerous," the many things in the "Tsukiji Jonai" are a condensation of the customs and know-how that have been cultivated over many years.
The people involved in the market and the fish and produce it handles have not changed after the move to Toyosu, but the architecture, storefronts, and facilities have vanished.
I have carefully documented these vanished things in search of the faces and traces of the people who lived there for 83 years.
Shozaburo Ishida made his debut as a photographer with the publication of "Radiation Buscape" (IG Photo Gallery, 2018), a collection of photographs taken from buses running through areas that have been declared a hard-to-return zone due to the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Following "Radiation Buscape," he also presented "CROSSING RAY" at IG Photo Gallery and HIJU Gallery (Osaka, 2019), which is a photographic composite of four directions of an intersection in Tokyo at night. These two series reveal Ishida's critical perspective on electric power, which is essential to contemporary urban civilization.
His latest work, "TSUKIJI JONAI 2018" on view in this exhibition, is a series of photographs of the interior of Tsukiji shijo, which closed on October 6, 2018.
It made headlines at the time that Tsukiji shijo, which had long been synonymous with the market, closed after 83 years and moved to Toyosu.
As it has been a year and a half since its closing and several photo books have already been published, Ishida's work may seem to be a "latecomer" as far as the subject matter of Tsukiji shijo is concerned.
However, "TSUKIJI JONAI 2018" has a perspective not found in any of the previous photographic works of Tsukiji shijo. It is a gaze that focuses on the "place" that is Tsukiji-shijo, and the "things" used there.
Typically in the Japanese photographic world, photographs of major events, such as the closing of the Tsukiji shijo, are focused on a human-centered documentary approach. However, does a photograph "portray people" if it shows people in it? There are no human figures in the Tsukiji shijo photographed by Ishida. What is present are the tools they have used over the years and the places and spaces where they worked. Although there are no humans in the photographs, the traces of their presence remind us there used to be human activity in the place.
The exquisitely composed black-and-white images recall many monochrome photographs in the history of photography. In particular, these works are in the lineage of the photographic expression of "things" pioneered by German Neuesachlichkeit photographers such as Albert Renger-Patsch, and American modernist photographers such as Walker Evans and Margaret Bourke-White.
Ishida's style, in which he dares not to photograph people, but instead tries to evoke history and memories from places and things, is a very legitimate form of photographic expression.
Nowadays, the site of Tsukiji shijo is no longer a topic of conversation, and the relocation issue is already behind us. The place and things captured in "TSUKIJI JONAI 2018" either no longer exist, or have changed their state drastically.
Ishida turns the critical perspective he has shown in his two works on electricity to the city's distribution system and the passage of time in "TSUKIJI JONAI 2018." We will have an opportunity to think about what Tsukiji-shijo was through his photographs.
![[Radiate-scape]&[Crossing Ray]](ishidaphoto/radiation/rad&cross.jpg)
