Naoki Honjo's photographs are taken from skyscrapers or helicopters, using of that flip-flop lens that we talked about. Why does he do this? First of all for technical reasons! To successfully take a photograph with the tilt-shift process, you need to be high up and have a bird's eye view. Aren't we always looking at a model of our height?

This positioning in height can also be explained by a very Japanese pictorial tradition: the perspective "the bird's eye view". Indeed, this desire to show the world from an aerial perspective of the "the bird's eyeview" in an artistic work,is not new to Japan. Japanese artists very early produced painted works Yamato-e with an inventive aerial perspective. Born in the 12th century, this techniquecalled  fukinuki yatai, meaning "roof removed". It allowed to see the scenes in their entirety (interior and exterior) according to a continuity adapted to a particular support, a low-height, wide-width roll of paper.

Representing our world seen from the sky is therefore not new, even before the invention drones! This prospect was imaginary, not real. Today with our means of air transport, be it helicopters, planes or drones, or even the height of our homes,  the skyscrapers going higher and higher, the artist has the possibility of using this perspective in real mode.

Naoki Honjo isn't the only one toying with this perspective. Other photographers Japanese are also famous for this type of high angle shooting, but with a different artistic language than Naoki Honjo.

The photographer Taiji Matsue shoots from a helicopter. It has two shooting rules: it excludes the horizon line and the sky from the image plane. And he uses direct light to prevent shadows from being cast on his subject. This creates a flat version of what the photographer sees at the time of the shot, and the result then questions the true nature of the photography.

Sohei Nishino, another well-known Japanese photographer, also gives the impression to send us pictures seen from the sky. The image is again misleading. Inspired by the 17th century Japanese cartographer, Ino Tadataka, whose engravings reinvented the cities he had visited, Sohei Nishino travels a city over a long period, exploring and photographing its many points of view to "construct" his work. Then he carefully prints the photographs and compiles them into one work, which he uses as the basis for his final photograph. The effect then is not a traditional bird's eye view, but an enlightened way of seeing three dimensions in a single plane of the photo. Although geographical precision is important in this process, the scales can be modified and the places photographed sometimes repeated, like an erroneous memory of'a place. Viewed from a distance, Sohei's photographs appear abstract, but if you look at them up close, they are as detailed as a "diorama" of the city.

Naomi Honjo's particularity is therefore not really to take his photographs from a height to give a real vision of what he sees, but to transform reality into something else.. The tilt-shift process does not erase all the details of the photographed landscape, but it plays with our point of view, overlapping reality and the imaginary world resulting from the transformation. Remember that Naoki Honjo does not digitally manipulate his photos. He sometimes has to wait several days to take the perfect shot.

Last year Naoki Honjo continued his illustration of the constant evolution of the Japanese capital, with his Tokyo series initiated in 2016, which testifies to the development of the city with the 2021 Olympic Games. His photographs of Tokyo offer a new vision of this postmodern metropolis, accentuating the artifice ofthis man-made environment.

To end on photography that shows the world in miniature, we are going to talk about another Japanese artist who practices photography in a playful way to question us about our world. Tanaka Tatsuya, an instagram star, uses its staging to transform the image and not his photographic process. Tanaka Tatsuya has posted daily since April 2011 small scenes of life in miniature, diverting the nature or the use first of the objects of everyday life to tell what he sees. For example, in his March 2022 posts, sponges become ping-pong tables, or a harmonica turns into a post office. Let's hear the artist speak from his work :

"There is joy in discovering how objects can look like something else. Simply by changing perspective. Unfortunately, we tend to lose this playful perspective as we grow into adults. We only thinkin terms of common sense and only perceive things in a wayfixed again. I try to change that. "

Naoki Honjo therefore does the same by bringing us back to miniature to better imagine what tomorrow could be and make us appreciate what we have today.

1. Naoki Honjo @ Top Museum, Tokyo: https://honjonaoki.exhibit.jp/en/index.html
2. Taiji Matsue@ Top Museum, Tokyo: https://topmuseum.jp/e/contents/exhibition/index-4032.html 
3. Taiji Matsue : https://www.taronasugallery.com/en/artists/taiji-matsue/ 
4. Website of the artist Sohei Nishino : https://soheinishino.net
5. Website of the artist Tatsuya tanaka : https://miniature-calendar.com