Photographs by Renato D’Agostin
Text by Ralph Gibson and Eikoh Hosoe
MC2Gallery Edizioni, 2009
Hardcover. Cloth.
88 pages
23.8x33cm
In Tokyo Untitled D’Agostin isolates himself in the geometries of the Japanese city. He narrates his journey through his experience of the street, describing with the language of abstract images, charged of deep blacks and sharp edges. Dislocating subjects from their realities, D’Agostin depicts his perception of the space around him, the relationship between the city’s architecture and its people, and their interferences. This is emphasized in Tokyo, according to D’Agostin, where he has no reference or connection with the external world, and his sense of disconnection brings him to a discovery of the unseen
From the preface by Renato D’Agostin
In 2007, I turned my attention to Japanese photography, which inspired me to explore what my point of view could be in a city so far from the world that had always surrounded me, but so close to the photographic imagery towards which I was addressing my attention.
Longing to break the unconscious, immediate and easy processes of the known and the predictable, I traveled to Tokyo for the first time.
I was immediately struck by a sense of disorientation and an inability to quickly locate my own position within the geography of the city. My lack of precise references to the external world created in me feelings of isolation and detachment from my previously known realities.
[…]
Tokyo Untitled represents a visual record of my journey to the “capital of the East” and its invisible elements diluted in visible everyday life.
From the afterword by Ralph Gibson
Tokyo Untitled is a perfect name for a place in the mind. A place that can only be accessed through the eyes; a visual place.
[…]
Tokyo is enormous because it is Untitled.
These images are the thinnest possible slices of inconceivable urban density. Slices so thin that they must be measured in fractions of light, tiny microscopic moments of DNA in time taken from the huge archeology of a true metropolis.
[…]
Everybody knows that Italians are great explorers. Perhaps this one went farther than he expected, directly into the light, into a fascinating and surreal city, not so much science-fiction, more like science-fact. Tokyo Untitled is anyplace you happen to find this book.
From the afterword by Eikoh Hosoe
It seems to me that Renato D’Agostin’s “Tokyo Untitled” is a record of the aura of a past Tokyo.
[…]
I have lived in Tokyo for more than seventy-six years except one year between September 1944 and 1945. During this period, I was forced to evacuate alone from Tokyo to Yonezawa City, Yamagata Prefecture, my mother’s native country 300 km northeast of Tokyo to avoid the fire-bombings by American B-29 bombers.
[…]
Renato D’Agostin’s “Tokyo Untitled” is a collection of surreal and abstract photographs with a strong and unforgettable aura of today’s Tokyo. I do hope his “Tokyo Untitled” will give most readers another vision of Tokyo’s abstract dream and reality of today.
