Blast by Naoya Hatakeyama, made from 1995 to 2008 in limestone quarries across Japan, photographs controlled explosions that break mountain rock into raw material for cement and urban construction. It emerged from Hatakeyama's earlier quarry studies, Lime Hills and Lime Works, and treats extraction and the city as parts of one material system. Calling broken rock "the beginning of a building," he likened the limestone removed from the quarry and the city constructed from it to a photographic negative and positive.
The color photographs move between distant quarry views and close frames in which debris, dust, and smoke nearly dissolve the landscape. Rust-red and charcoal rock, ocher ground, white clouds, blue-gray sky, and patches of vegetation contrast geological mass with atmospheric dispersion. Individual images coexist with pairs and longer sequences, allowing changes in trajectories, collapse, and haze to register across successive fractions of a blast.
Unable to remain in the danger zone, he positioned a radio-controlled Nikon F5 loaded with 35mm film near the blast, withdrew, and triggered rapid sequences from a distance. He saw what the camera recorded only after laboratory processing and printing, making delayed discovery and chance operational conditions of the work. In A BIRD / BLAST #130, a bird crossed the frame before, during, and after the detonation, unnoticed until development. The series appeared as chromogenic and Lambda prints, including works measuring 100 by 150 centimeters. Still sequences also formed the basis of the 2011 video installation Twenty-Four Blasts.
Blast first appeared in Another Reality: Aspects of Contemporary Photography at Kawasaki City Museum in 1995-96 and entered Hatakeyama's 2002 retrospectives in Japan and Europe. The 2011-12 Natural Stories exhibition presented prints and a large-screen video in Tokyo, at Huis Marseille, and at SFMOMA. Following the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami, which destroyed his family home in Rikuzentakata, Hatakeyama revisited the series through a new selection of photographs for a 2013 Taka Ishii Gallery exhibition, accompanied by Shogakukan's bilingual BLAST, the first comprehensive photobook of the project. The Minneapolis Institute of Art included the work in Excavating the Future City in 2018, and examples are held by SFMOMA, the National Museum of Art, Osaka, and the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum.
