Seen: 地熱 Geothermal Heat
Who: 佐藤圭司 Keiji Sato / website
Where: RED Photo Gallery, Shinjuku
When: July 6 - 19, 2020 / 12:00-19:00 daily
This s an exhibition of Keiji Sato’s otherworldly photographs of Izu Oshima, an island that makes up part of Tokyo.
Sato, known for his urban Tokyo and Bangkok street photography, presents landscapes evoke freshly formed vistas where no human has yet set foot. The reddish soil, peppered with shoots of young grasses, looked to me as images of the first stages of terraforming Mars. Picture the stuff sent back from @marscuriosity , but with more greenery and rain.
A Shinto torii gate appears in one image- a marker of Japanese animism that’s entirely fitting for this environment.