A Place
By Hideki Makiguchi
Published by Vacant
Tokyo, 2023 

The portico of a nondescript apartment complex in the dead of night, illuminated by a single bulb; the interior of what appears to be an atrium containing a vending machine, behind which stands a public telephone and a photobooth, lit by metallic strip-lights; the corner of a black chain-link fence, evening time, a simple street lamp, the field beyond receding into the shadows; the driveway of a suburban house; and a dancefloor, slightly out of focus, the most liminal of all the frames.

The scenes and locations in Japanese photographer Hideki Makiguchi’s monograph A Place (2023) are devoid of human life and somewhat detached from history, denuded of any grounding context (or even concept), captionless and inert, like one of Eugène Atget’s photographs of deserted Parisian streets that he likened to crime scenes. Here there is an acute estrangement between people and their environment, a disconnect that brings forth Bertolt Brecht’s conception of the photographic medium as being “complicated by the fact that less than at any time does a simple reproduction of reality tell us anything about reality.”