The Matsue Rule
Essay by Nozlee Samadzadeh
Perspective changes everything. Taiji Matsue’s photographs of landscapes appear to be paintings for the sheer scale of content—geometric lines of cities and curves of mountains so elegant they could only be fake, except that they’re real. Scaling down, his photographs of humans look like paintings as well, but because of his crop-and-zoom technique that renders them into blurry nobodies busy sunbathing, going to work, and getting married.
Taiji Matsue lives in Tokyo, Japan. His work has been featured at the 2004 Arles Rencontres, the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and has been published in the collections Hysteric Glamour
, JP-22
, and Cell
. He has won awards such as the Higashikawa Prize in 1996 and the Kimura Ihei Memorial Photography Award in 2002. Matsue is represented by Amador Gallery. All images courtesy of the artist, all rights reserved.
TMN Assistant Editor
Nozlee Samadzadeh will lie to you the first time you meet her, but never again afterward. She lives in Oklahoma, goes to school in Connecticut, and likes airports even when they’re miserable. Thanks to Twitter, she has a preternatural ability to think in
140-character increments.
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