THE NARCISSISTIC CITY by Takashi Homma

都市にある建築物が捉えた、日本とアメリカの都市の風景。「都市によって都市を撮影する」と本シリーズを形容するホンマタカシが用いたのが、写真の原点とも言える”カメラオブスキュラ”である。その原始的な撮影手法により切り取られたのは、ありのままの風景とは異なる都市に潜む影の群像。独特に重なり合う光と影が映り込んだ都市の姿は、まるでナルキッソスが水に映る自分の姿の美しさに見とれたというギリシャ神話の一節ように、通常のカメラの鮮明さが欠落したからこそ現れる自己陶酔的なイメージをはらんでいる。

What kind of gaze does the city license? What kind of gaze does it induce, determine, inform, program, organise? What is the nature of the city as reality, as image and as symbol? What is this object of desire, at once near and ungraspable, fascinating and repulsive, attractive and intractable, necessary and unbearable, intimate and impenetrable, available and inaccessible, that it is for itself as well as for the man of the crowd, for the man in the street, for the man of the city, for those who inhabit it and those merely passing through it, for anyone who knows that it is a labyrinth but nonetheless allows himself to remain trapped in it? - Hubert Damisch

Takashi Homma uses fragments collected in camera obscura constructed in metropolitan areas of Japan and the US to build a city image by image. Homma does not seek to index any particular city but to render a shadow world, a city's unconscious caught in a dark chamber, suspended in the camera’s box. The camera obscura offers a repetition, like the reflection shimmering in Narcissus’s pool. The narcissistic city is a city transfixed upon its own image – a mirror city, laced with repetition (modular) and reflections (glass). A city looking at its reflection, a city caught in a dark chamber, a city observing its camera obscura inversion – flickering inside the camera’s box.