I feel slightly guilty posting this as I know by the time you read it, that it will be improbable you will find a copy as there are only 50 copies in the edition. Hopefully, it will inspire the publisher Photobook Daydream Editions to consider publishing more, as Fumitsugu Takedo’s Ambience Decay is one of my favorite finds during the end of 2024. With Japanese artists, keeping up with the phenomenal titles coming out of the country is challenging. There is an incredible amount of great books that one finds out about in retrospect or when it is tough to track down due to edition size. It is also nearly impossible to be a completist with most Japanese artists due to their proficiency in publishing. I have been working toward securing a decent library of Japanese titles focusing on the 70s and 80s. I must admit that I am woefully behind in the 90s regarding contemporary books. You choose your battles, but those battles can eventually shift fronts.

Fumitsugu’s Ambience Decay hits several interesting points that intrigue me. First and foremost, it feels fresh, and it feels claustrophobic. There is no misaligning the atmosphere of the book, which is compressed, anxiety-inspiring, and slightly culled from cinematic dispositions. In a very loose sense, street photography also makes an impression within the book, as does a favorite condition of mine, the screen. When I mention the screen, the object is two-fold or two-dimensional. First, there is an insistence on photographing or re-photographing images in which people use their phones. This happens on transit or travel platforms and trains, and on the surface, it looks like an everyday commute, but the feeling of being locked into the device or screen pervades. It is not so much social commentary as it is anti-social reality. The second permutation of the screen is found in how the artist leaves screen artifacts in his images on the page, suggesting a re-photography of pictures from a screen that reminds one of CCTV monitors, almost as if the artist were working for a Japanese train company in which he could photograph commuters as they pass.

There is a considerable history of Japanese photography concerned with trains, train stations, and photographing on trains. Daido Moriyama, Ikko Kagari, Mikiko Hara, and many others have used the train and train stations as a muse. Shinjuku station itself is reported to be the most photographed train station in the world. In the case of Fumitsugu, there is the feeling of a screen between some of the images and the photographer. In others, there is something that feels like the artist is stalking people or recording the flow of people on his daily commute to work or through the caverns of the city. The images take on a vernacularized presence, a snapshot aesthetic that at first presents as benign and then over the flow of the book takes on a more sinister form in the repetition of motifs. Voyeurism is implicit, but they are not static images eliciting desire, but more in the vein of Sophie Calle, questioning proximity and indulgence.

The press release for the book suggests the following…

Smartphones, tablets, and signage advertisements saturate the city.

Fumitsugu Takedo captures urban landscapes adapting to the media environment shaped by the proliferation of digital platforms. Using snapshots, Takedo incorporates copies of his photographs and video media to explore the possibilities of visual-spatial cognition in a modern world where the line between reality and media fiction blurs.

The flickering, irreversible time sequence—days, weeks, and years played in reverse. The glitch of memory and the flicker of half-remembered thoughts set to a drum & bass beat.

Loneliness rewound, painted in purple and blue.

“Can you open the door?”

A story written from the end, with no beginning: memory at 2/3 speed, fragmented hands, feet, technology, and echoes of Bresson.

Images that repeat and images that only seem to—but never indeed do. Out of order. Lapsed.

In asserting the cinematic ties, but also the cryptic nod to re-photography, the worlds of what is real, borrowed, and insinuated in the artist’s work lie at the heart of what makes it interesting. Like Daido Moriyama’s Farewell Photography, the base of the images do not matter. What matters is the result, the cold, seething world that Fumitsugu reveals to us. It is less about narrative than narrative possibility, like many films with an enduring quality. If desired, one is permitted to speculate, dream, and retreat from the work. I am reminded of Possession by Andrzej Żuławski (1981) when I look at the work, particularly the barefooted frame (repeating motif along with hands) and the constant themes of rains and their architectural ports/underground stations. It is a bit of a stretch, but there is something hallucinatory in the work, which may stem more from the idea of screens and technology than some nascent node to post-surrealist fever dreams under the aegis of communist rule.

It is an easy book to project onto, like some of Moriyama’s finest work from 1972. I am also reminded a little bit of Kikujo Kawada’s Vortex and the way in which considerations of fast photography is a seemingly interesting point of return. Phones and technology also making up some of that volume’s rigor. Fumitsugu’s book has my highest recommendation, and with all best intentions, I am happy to see things moving past the Rinko Kawauchi era. As much as I love her work, some critical topics exist outside of pictures for pictures’ sake that feel pertinent right now. I also like seeing a darker edge come back into the mix as the times we are surfing ask us for this type of consideration. Highest Recommendation. Sorry if you can’t find it, truly.

Ambience Decay

Fumitsugu Takedo

Photobook Daydream Editions