Yasuyuki Takagi – Brooklyn Lot Recordings

Review by Hans Hickerson ·

Yasuyuki Takagi photographs urban neglect and decay but also renewal in Brooklyn Lot Recordings. The book is a catalog of what he saw in empty lots in Brooklyn, New York between 1995 and 2005, and his photographs present the detritus of modern life accumulating in vacant spaces behind and between buildings.

You might think that there would not be much to say about vacant lots in Brooklyn. Takagi finds a lot to say however, and he offers a surprising variety of views and details. He presents walls, weeds, and chain-link fences; smashed-up cars, concrete, chairs, and pieces of plastic; rotting boxes, mattresses, carpet, and furniture; abandoned appliances, shopping carts, tires, and phone books; and lots of graffiti-covered buildings, car bodies, and signs.

We do not see any people, but we do see hints of nature in the form of sunlight, clouds, snow, and sky, along with trees and vegetation, often scraggly weeds but sometimes surprising patches of woodland and verdant meadow. Besides getting in close, Takagi steps back for street views as well as riverfront scenes with water and Manhattan skylines.

Takagi’s photographs are seemingly straightforward visual recordings or documents, but their compositions are inflected by his eye and sensibility, his feeling for color and texture, for forms, planes, and lines, and his openness to new ideas for content to add to his themed collection. They may depict chaos and disorder but as visual statements his images are ordered, comprehensible, and coherent. Presented as a collection in a book, they function as an argument for the importance of the insignificant, quietly insisting on visual facts worthy of a place in our collective memory.

Takagi’s project recalls Lewis Baltz’ industrial parks and also his San Quentin Point. Takagi’s photographs, however, are in color and they include more frequent anecdotes and narrative asides à la Martin Parr, as if he is delighted to share this or that memorable discovery: chickens; a multi-colored Rug Rats comforter draped on a tipped-over shopping cart; a tiny dinner fork lost in a wide expanse of empty ground; a lyrical view of snow on a building but with graffiti that reads, “Egg salad 4 the family!”

In terms of layout, the images in Brooklyn Lot Recordings are mostly square and one to a page spread. As a change of pace, every so often a horizontal image spreads over two pages, and in three places, four pages of warmer-toned uncoated stock offer texts and poems.

A weighty, handsome volume, Brooklyn Lot Recordings offers commentary on urban decline and disorder packaged as visually rich food for thought.

Hans Hickerson, Editor of the PhotoBook Journal, is a photographer and photobook artist from Portland, Oregon.

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Yasuyuki Takagi – Brooklyn Lot Recordings

Photographer : Yasuyuki Takagi

Languages : English, Japanese

Poems : José Pariá, Sevinç Çalhanoğlu

Art : Mint & Serf

Text : Yasuyuki Takagi, Adrian Moeller

Art direction : Akira Takubo

Printing : Yamada Photo Process Co.

Embossed hardcover; sewn binding; 148 pages; 95 color, 6 B/W photographs;
25 cm x 25 cm

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Articles and photographs published in the PhotoBook Journal may not be reproduced without the permission of the PhotoBook Journal staff and the photographer(s). All images, texts, and designs are under copyright by the authors and publishers.