America, where time vanishes

From the anthology published in the Seventies, the exhibition Where Time Has Vanished presented at the TakaIshii Gallery Photography / Film was born: fifteen vintage prints taken from the famous series created by Ikko Narahara during his travels in the United States between 1970 and 1974 and collected in the photo book of the same name in 1975. Taken when Narahara crossed the country, from the foggy port of San Francisco to the ghost towns of the desert, these images are evidence of an obsession with the dimension of suspended time, with America seen with intimately oriental eyes, capable of capturing in the vastness and abandonment ideas to reflect on existence and the psyche. The photographs, made in black and white with a language that is sometimes frontal, sometimes poetic-abstract, reproduce the suggestions felt by the author: a house wrapped in creepers, an abandoned airport, a landscape marked by an inexorable light, in which contrasts become visual narration. Narahara, who trained in the 1950s with VIVO, the agency he founded with Tomatsu and Hosoe, and is a child of the golden age of Japanese auteur photography, transforms travel into an existential investigation. In a 1975 statement, he talks about the mystery he felt in front of an American house, bringing with him a sense of alienation and fear, the result of a gaze capable of reading the soul of a remote place. Narahara has traveled across Europe and the United States, raised doubts about the relationship between memory and vision, and questioned the categories of documentation and environmental portraiture. The work presented at Kyobashi is part of a broader discourse: the conflict between temporal construction and nature in motion, between human presence and emptiness, between nostalgia and Western alienation. Where Time Has Vanished is not just a review of historical photographs: it is a direct confrontation with a gaze that spans over half a century, returning the images of a distant yet intimate America. To accompany this photographic excursion, the photobook will be republished in the Summer of 2025, offering the public a new opportunity to rediscover one of the greatest contemporary interpreters of anthropological visual narration.