shashasha

Taishi Hirokawa's Babel Ordinary Landscapes is a photographic exploration of our current and past states of human exapansion and its costs. Hirokawa photographs areas such as Niigata, Nagano, Fukushima and Tokyo capturing areas in which traces of human presence is evident on an industrial scale . Mining towns, damns, to sites of construction, the resulting images capture a haunting yet beautiful image of the monuments left by humans commenting upon the costs of humans expansion on our current and future existence.

Aesthetically speaking, Hirokawa has opted for an extremely stoic approach in this book. Artificial objects placed in natural settings are filled with an indescribable tedium, and their methodical geometry seems puzzlingly uncontrollable. The ambitious dazzle of the modern era, which set out to subjugate nature, has already been rendered inert and now we are confronted with the bleak results.

―Keiichiro Hirano "Our Place"