I started taking landscape photos with a Linhof Technika V, a large, clumsy, hard-to-use camera.
Because I wanted to take photos without interposing myself on the landscape in front of me.
I remember that around 2006 I started driving around in my car all day and shooting whatever grabbed my attention. Initially,
I would go to the coast of the Boso Peninsula near Tokyo in the autumn, when no one was about, and shoot a beach house named “New Popeye” .
I’d point the lens directly at the setting sun — it was really dazzling.
At the beach, looking at the sign “New Popeye” with the name written on plywood in red paint, and hearing nothing but the sound of the waves,
I’d be hit by the strange feeling I was in a place not of this world.
That landscape was totally quiet.

After a number of trips I wanted to go to the Shimokita Peninsula and so headed for Aomori.
Aomori was the native place of my grandparents.
Driving on a highway on the outskirts of Hachinohe at night, I saw fireworks off in the distance, though it wasn’t the season for them.
The same kind of fireworks shot up again and again from the same place.
When I came closer, I saw that it was neon fireworks decorating the roof of a Love Hotel.
Without hesitating I photographed them.
The camera captured not only the light of the neon but also the dark blue gradations of the night sky.
Thinking that it would be boring to stay at a business hotel, I spent the night at a different Love Hotel nearby.
That hotel had red and green neon at its entrance, which I photographed.
The printed photos captured yellow light in between the red and green that couldn’t be seen by the naked eye.
When I left my room the next day, the pink, blue and green outer walls of the hotel were bathed in light.
The sun was still low.
I unhesitatingly photographed the scene while a middle-aged lady at the hotel looked at me suspiciously; perhaps I had been chuckling to myself.

I went to many places all over Japan to take photos.
As I kept photographing, I realized that I had traveled to the end of the Japanese archipelago.
I had been to many peninsulas and run on many beaches.
At the tips and ends of land I had struggled to reach, I continued to shoot something that was already there when I arrived,
be it a Love Hotel, Pachinko Parlor or Game Center.
There was something already in the scenery, often concealed in distinctive decoration that far exceeded the designs of those who had made it.
Did I only want to photograph something interesting in the decorations?
But if that wasn’t the case, what was I seeing in the colorful artificial objects in bad taste
I happened to encounter while looking for “scenery” that had nothing to do with me?
All I can say is something was already there when I arrived, something that had drifted there, something that was bathed in sunlight or blown by the wind.
Even now I have not stopped driving around in my car with my hard-to-use Technika.

TAKAMURADAISUKE