shashasha

In their 2004 book, “The Photobook: A History”, Martin Parr and Gerry Badger write about Taiji Matsue’s landscape photography: “Taiji Matsue takes the genre to a conceptual extreme, doing for the landscape what Ken Ohara did for the human face.”
Approaching the genre with a formalistic mind, Matsue, originally trained as a geographer, manages to flatten and erase much of the individuality in the landscape photographs he takes. His images, on first view, blend together into an almost uniform vision of the world. Scenes from regions as diverse as Iran, central USA, Japan, Costa Rica, Tasmania, the Andes and places in Europe appear, in Matsue’s photographs, to be from one and the same place.

“However, it is clear to an attentive observer of Matsue’s photographs that they do more than simply making the statement that ‘photography is fiction.’ The real attributes of actual places overflow the boundaries of this concept.”