Takashi Homma: Tokyo

Takashi Homma was born in Tokyo in 1962, studied photography at Nihon University College of Art, and spent two years in London in the early 1990s shooting for i-D magazine before returning to Japan. He received the Kimura Ihei Commemorative Photography Award in 1999 for Tokyo Suburbia, a work now considered a contemporary classic, and a major retrospective of his work opened at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa in 2010. His work is held in the collections of the National Museum of Modern Art Tokyo, the Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art, the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, and the Fotomuseum Winterthur in Zurich.

Published by Aperture in 2008, Takashi Homma: Tokyo brings together selections from six of Homma’s previously published titles on the city, the first volume of his work published for an international audience. The book presents his decade-long portrait of the metropolis: parking lots and housing developments, fast-food chains and suburban highways, teenagers and children, the city’s familiar surfaces rendered strange through a lens that navigates between clinical observation and quiet sentiment. It is a contemporary Japanese photography book design for a work situated in the tradition of Daido Moriyama’s Tokyo, and extending it into the present.

de.MO designed the book, choosing a smaller, novel-like format with thick uncoated paper and a soft cover to reinforce Homma’s intimate, restrained vision of the city.