The Photograph is a Question: Takano and Photographic Seeing

An essay produced for the catalogue of a museum retrospective of Japanese photographer Ryudai Takano, Ryudai Takano: Daily Photographs 1999-2021, at the National Museum of Art Osaka.

Takano's exploration of gender, desire and the transformation of the body through photographic encounter and representation is framed in this exhibition through his daily practice of producing sequences of images exploring everydayness subtly destabilised by the gaze of the camera. The essay placed his strategy for working with photography to look at the unrepresented, excessive, or infinitely sensitive surfaces of the body into its full context.