Foam Magazine #21 / MERGE / Naoya Hatakeyama

Naoya Hatakeyama was born in 1958 in Iwate Prefecture, Japan. He completed his graduate studies at Tsakuba University in 1984, since when he has been based in Tokyo, a city which continuously fuels his interest in the relationship between nature, the city and photography. His photographic works examine the city in a serial manner; it’s past, present and future. He employs the vocabulary of photography to reflect upon the relationship between humans and their environment.

In 1997 Hatakeyama received the 22nd Kimura Ihei Memorial Photography Award. In addition to numerous solo and group exhibitions, Hatakeyama’s photographs are found in the public collections of the National Museum of Modern Art, Osaka, the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, the Swiss Foundation for Photography, Winterthur, La Maison Européene de la Photographie, Paris and the Victoria & Albert Museum, in London. Hatakeyama has been invited to participate in Les Rencontres d’Arles in 2009, and also nominated for the Prix Pictet 2009.

Based on a series commissioned by the Canadian Architecture Centre, Scales is an attempt to investigate how architecture and three-dimensionality can be translated onto a flat surface.