It is the invisible structure of urban environment – hidden from view in the same manner as the blackness of film negative conceals the whiteness of positive print – that disrupts the emergence of new forms of thinking, or acting, and thus causes any form of artistic practice to be either complicit or impossible.
[…] corridors and passages, back alleys, construction sites, close-up fragments of buildings and roads, the periphery and the wastelands of the Tokyo Bay. Nevertheless, if we keep in mind that the ‘theory of landscape’ is primarily disclosing how the state wields its policing even when there is no visible conlict, these images claim such (invisible) practices of spatial organisation as urban planning, sewage construction, and traic regulation, to be intrinsic to the state’s management of the urban environment.10 They are not disinterested portrayals of the city’s everyday fabric but bring to the fore the networks of circulation – highways, roads, and underground – that are fundamental to the transmission and distribution of goods, information, and labour.
The city, and particularly its generally invisible lip side, becomes the chief component in the elaboration of the theory, and features heavily in both Matsuda’s writing and Nakahira’s photographs, to an extent that we also come to think that an implied meaning of the 1970 collection could be For a City to Come.
From: For a City to Come The Material of Takuma Nakahira’s Photography by Jelena Stojković
Image from: Circulation: Date, Place, Events, Paris 1971