What a concept: Imagine if you could see as clearly and in as much detail at midnight as you can at noon. The desire for night vision is an old one, but frankly the visions provided by new technologies have not impressed me -- the best I've experienced were a set of cumbersome electric goggles that yielded greenish, ghostlike images. Much better are the serene nocturnal views in the new body of work by Japanese photographer Tomoyuki Sakaguchi.
Now showing at the Guardian Garden Gallery in Ginza, the exhibition, titled "Home," comprises 26 pictures from Sakaguchi's ongoing experiments with digital-camera time exposures. The pictures were shot during the early hours of the morning in residential neighborhoods in and around Tokyo. Sakaguchi set the exposures at 30 seconds, and chose mundane subjects -- the compact (some would say ugly) prefabricated homes inhabited by typical middle-class families, and their little driveways and gardens. The results, though, are hardly mundane; they are, actually, nothing short of fascinating.
"I had done a lot of central Tokyo photographs in the past, skyscrapers and trains," says Sakaguchi, "and so I wanted to try a different location. I went to normal homes and photographed them at night. When I saw the results I was surprised, I felt as if I was looking at another world."