Shinichiro Kobayashi and Fumimasa Hosokawa at Silver Eye

Art in America, Oct, 2005 by Melissa Kuntz

The exhibition "Unspoken Ground: Two Views of Japan" at the Silver Eye Center for Photography combined the work of two midcareer photographers based in Tokyo. Shinichiro Kobayashi's rich color prints, taken between 1991 and 2000, document construction sites and the resulting environmental destruction of the landscape in Okinawa and Hokkaido. In Fumimasa Hosokawa's more conceptual project, the artist researches public records going back 100 years to find obituaries of people who died on the streets in and around Tokyo in accidents, fights or from illness. Hosokawa visited the locations--determined from the descriptions and addresses in the obituaries--and photographed the sites in black and white in an "official-looking" documentary style. Both photographers point their cameras at should-be populated areas--city streets, construction sites--yet all the settings in the more than 30 works in this show are deserted. This in itself is not particularly unusual. But Kobayashi and Hosokawa focus on the implied interaction of human and site.

In his visually stunning photographs, taken with a large-format Linhof camera and printed at 9 1/2 by 11 1/2 inches, Kobayashi finds beauty in the tension between man and nature. In Ehime (1995), construction equipment along with conspicuous gridded structures, tubes and pipes appear as delicately drawn lines in a cutaway hillside. The interplay of colors often seems too exquisite to be purely coincidental: red and white linear elements play off green horizontal pipes and blue tarps. In the preface to his book Deathtopia (1998), a related series on Japan's industrial revolution, Kobayashi says he intends to first entice the viewer with beauty, and then ask whether our negative impact on the environment is worthwhile.

More poignant than formally beautiful, Hosokawa's 22 gelatin silver prints (2000-02, 20 by 24 inches) each show the obituary that inspired the accompanying image. (The gallery placed English translations on the wall beside each piece.) He provides the forgotten histories of the locations, but because the images don't always seem to correspond to the narratives, the texts often read more like poetry than death notices. In 1901, for example, a photograph of a characterless paved road with parking signs and a smattering of trees in the background is accompanied by text describing an "approximately 60-year-old man, with thin hair, a 'low nose,' wearing an unlined livery coat ... discovered at this location, 'dead from disease.'" The photograph 1961 shows a small bar nestled between two modern high rises, where an unidentified woman with "a round face and long permed hair, carrying a Shiseido lipstick and a green comb" was found dead on the tracks, now covered up, after being struck by a train near Itabashi Station. In this compelling exhibition, a visual and conceptual dialogue unfolds between the works of two photographers who investigate the effect of human activity on this planet.