When visiting tourist sites, many people take photographs from the same spot, producing remarkably similar images. This phenomenon cannot be attributed to photography alone; rather, it emerges from the interplay of transportation systems such as railways, tourism infrastructures, and the prevailing values of each era, which together have selected and repeated certain landscapes as “must-see” views.
JAPAN GUIDE BOOK is an attempt to reconsider how the act of seeing is shaped before we are even consciously aware of it. I focus on how landscapes in Japan—particularly those regarded as “famous places”—have been photographed, remembered, and reproduced through photographic medium. Working with archives such as postcards and historical photographs, I examine the visual culture surrounding tourist sites.
From late nineteenth-century Yokohama photography to contemporary live camera feeds, landscapes have consistently been captured from fixed viewpoints. These viewpoints are closely tied to the construction of touristic value and cultural identity, and through repeated circulation, certain views have come to be accepted as natural.
This project seeks to make visible the systems that structure how we see landscapes by tracing the persistence and transformation of these viewpoints. By cutting out iconic locations in white, I leave blank spaces that temporarily suspend the assumptions underpinning these ways of seeing. This creates a distance from established modes of perception and invites viewers to reconsider how their gaze has been formed.
In an age saturated with images, this work questions not only what we see, but how we are made to see.
Website
https://kazunarisuzuki.com/
Collaborating Artist
Kazunari Suzuki
