Trails by Takashi Homma (March 29, 2010) 
(16 votes, average: 2.88 out of 5)
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Introduction by Marc Feustel
Takashi Homma’s Trails is a disturbing trek through snow-covered woods, on the tracks of a trail of blood. Bloodstains appear in each photograph, soaking into the blanket of pure white snow and giving a strange, tense narrative structure to the series. These could be forensic photographs, as they follow the trail of blood to the body of a deer lying in a stream, but little is revealed and the sense of cold dread emanating from these images lingers on. Trails is a departure from Homma’s best known wry observational photographs of the banality of life in Tokyo suburbia. Homma retains his characteristic distant gaze, which is heightened by the cold blue tones of these images. The work also has an unusual tension as these photographs seem to walk the line between some form of forensic document and a constructed, fictional narrative.
Marc Feustel is an independent curator, writer and blogger based in Paris. A specialist in Japanese photography, he is the author of Japan: a self-portrait, photographs 1945-1964 (Flammarion, 2004) and the creative director of Studio Equis (www.studioequis.net), an organisation devoted to broadening access to the visual arts between different cultures, with a focus on the relationship between Asia and the West. He blogs at Weblink: eyecurious.com
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The work presented here, taken from the book Trails comprises photographs and paintings. It concentrates on three basic components – snow, forest, and blood – with simply a few lines and contrast of color.
Trails opens to an image of mostly virgin snow speckled with a bit of frozen blood but acts as a moment of foreshadowing as the following images have us venturing deeper into the forest and discovering animal tracks left in the snow. It is several images in that we pick up the fading blood trail and follow it to the source.
The images are deeply tinted cyan which gives a cold, silent feeling and the blood an odd unrealistic hue which for me makes them less aggressive.
Whatever has taken place and whether the act was made by man on animal or animal on animal, the harmony seems to be relating to the cycles of a food chain, not with acts made out of anger. Text: excerpt from weblink.
Takashi Homma (1962) lives and works in .
Click weblink 5b4.blogspot.com/2009/07/first-jay-comes-and-trails-by-takashi.html or browse our archives
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This post was mentioned on Twitter by eyecurious: Day 5 of 7 on @Bite_magazine: Takashi Homma’s Trails: Virgin Snow Speckled With A Bit Of Frozen Blood http://cli.gs/YBNzZ...