Ryūji Miyamoto (宮本 隆司, Miyamoto Ryūji, born 1947) is a Japanese photographer, best known as the "ruins photographer".Ryūji Miyamoto, “Miyamoto Ryūji no intabyū: ‘Toshi no muishiki’ wo toru” (An interview with Miyamoto Ryūji: Shooting the ‘city’s unsconious’), Kenchiku bunka 645 (July 2000), p.106. Having studied graphic design at Tama Art University in Tokyo, he taught himself photography and began as an architectural journalist for magazines and newspapers. Inspired by the landscapes of post-war Japan that marked his childhood he came to reckon the imagery of destruction when he received a commission from Asahi Graph (pictorial journal) to document the demolition of the Nakano Prison in Tokyo.Cushman 2018, p.38.
His early work focusing on the demolition of modern buildings led to the Architectural Apocalypse series.Cushman 2018, p.37. He later thematized what he calls "handmade architecture" (tezukuri kenchiku) Cushman 2018, p.88. through his documentation of Kowloon Walled City and his survey of Cardboard Houses constructed by homeless people in Japan and around the world, documenting the ways in which people manage to inhabit the city informally.
In 1995, he applied the same survey method to document the Kobe earthquake (KOBE 1995 After The Earthquake). These images were later used as a basis for criticism of reconstruction methods that obscure the memory of the disaster Cushman 2018, p.146. and resulted in his selection for the Japanese Pavilion of the Venice Biennale of Architecture in 1996 by Arata Isozaki, known for his discourse on ruins. Miyamoto's turn between modern urban ruins and the impact of disasters was also embodied in the film: 3.11 TSUNAMI 2011, for which he changed his working method, co-creating it with three survivors of the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, feeling unable to document the disaster.Cushman 2018, p.190.
His photography, however, is never about the negativity of ruins. As the title of his retrospective exhibition at the Setagaya Art Museum in Tokyo (2004) evokes, he gazes at "things that are disappearing, things that are being born." His photographs exposes the ideology of progress in modern urban development, by uncovering its relation to heritage preservation, disasters, social downgrading, and informal lifestyles.
Early life and career Ryūji Miyamoto was born in Tokyo in 1947. He remembers his neighborhood, Toyama Heights in Shin-Okubo, Shinjuku as a "hilly area with municipal housing projects and elementary schools curiously interspersed among concrete ruins", that he considers as a typical view of Tokyo in the years just after World War II had ended.
He witnessed the rapid post-war urban changes, the reconstruction of cities, accelerated by the 1964 Tokyo Olympic and boosted by the Japanese economic miracle:Miyamoto studied at the Tama Art University and graduated from the graphic design department in 1973. During his studies, he participated to a discussion group called "Thought Collective Being", which is the starting point of the Bikyōtō collective, of which he was briefly a part.Tomii, Reiko. “The Impossibility of Anti: A Theoretical Consideration of Bikyōtō.” In Copeland, Mathieu, and Balthazar Lovay, eds. Anti-Museum. Exh. cat. Fribourg: Fri Art and Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther, 2016. p. 474. In the early 1970's, he worked as a designer and self-trained photographer for publications such as Toshi Jūtaku, Jūtaku Kenchiku, Asahi Graph, and Tokyojin. Miyamoto’s approach is indebted to his early years working as an architectural photographer, a field dominated by the so-called objective style of reportage photography (hōdō shashin).Cushman 2018, p.41. Miyamoto’s early career in architectural journalism suggests an origin for his interest in historic architecture and contextualizes his choice of serial photography as a form of preservation.Cushman 2018, p.53. Miyamoto took on the supposedly neutral role of reporter or "surveyor".
His career as an independent photographer gained momentum in 1983, when upon hearing of the impending demolition of the notorious Nakano Prison, he was contracted by the pictorial journal Asahi Graph to document the demolition. Miyamoto returned to the prison on his own throughout the demolition. As the interiors were dismantled and wall after wall came crashing down, he felt as if the materials that comprised the buildings were being released from their role as “Architecture” dictated by humans :
Ruins such as the Nakano prison remind him of the post-war landscapes he saw as a child.
After this project, Miyamoto began to photograph structures in the process of their dismantlement.Cushman 2018, p.4. He used the term kaitai genba ("scenes of dismemberment of a building") rather than ruin, drawing an analogy between building and human body (kaibô genba meaning anatomical dissection).
Architectural Apocalypse After documenting the demolition of Tokyo's Nakano Prison in 1983, Miyamoto spent five years observing the changing face of the city and its architecture. He focused on demolition sites, which he calls "tsukanoma no haikyo" or "temporary ruins". The curator Hasegawa Yuko describes this fondness for ruins as a "corrective reaction to the violent changes in the cityscape that had become the status quo."Beginning with Hans Poelzig’s Grosses Schauspielhaus in Berlin, Architectural Apocalypse documents the final days of historic early-twentieth-century buildings, traces of the past that had been deemed inefficient, out of place, and unnecessary in the globalizing metropolis.Cushman 2018, p.35. Miyamoto pictures them individually with a focus on the material decomposition of the structure. The buildings that Miyamoto photographed in the midst of their demolition represent a range of industries geared towards popular entertainment, such as cinemas, breweries, department stores, and the remnants of international expos. Hayashi describes these buildings as “significant gathering places for the masses in the modern city, spaces of pleasure where they enjoyed themselves while dreaming utopian dreams.”
In 1988, Miyamoto compiled his images of “temporary ruins” into a photobook provocatively entitled Kenchiku no mokushiroku (Architectural Apocalypse).Cushman 2006, p.40. In 1988, Miyamoto received the Kimura Ihei Award for Architectural Apocalypse, and since 1986 these photographs have been featured in more than fifty individual and group exhibitions. The images were published in architectural journals such as SD (Space + Design), Toshi Jūtaku, and Shitsunai at the same time that they were appearing in the journals Asahi Graph and Bijutsu Techō.Cushman 2018, p.52. The photobook was republished in 2003 with additional images, and it was a centerpiece of Miyamoto’s 2004 retrospective exhibition at the Setagaya Art Museum in Tokyo.Cushman 2018, p.36.
Kowloon Walled City In 1973, Miyamoto and the editorial staff of the Toshi Jūtaku conducted a survey on the construction of Motomachi High-Rise Apartments. Miyamoto was marked on this occasion by the poor housing area of Motomachi - known as the "genbaku slum" - a consequence of the temporary barracks construction after the 1945 atomic bomb. Miyamoto describes working on projects such as this as a revelatory time in his early career: “It was the first time I looked at and paid attention to certain things, such as housing and architecture and different ways of living.” Cushman 2018, p.95.
On January 14, 1987, the government of Hong Kong made the official announcement that Kowloon Walled City, the notorious 2.7-hectare slum on Kowloon Island, would be demolished and the land turned into a park before the sovereignty of the territory will be transferred to China.Cushman 2018, p.122. Miyamoto decided to visit Hong Kong in May of that year. He spent his first day photographing only the exterior of the Walled City. On his second day, Miyamoto hired a local guide and entered the city.Cushman 2018, p.125.Most of the photographs that Miyamoto initially published of Kowloon are made up of these alleyways, revealing perspectives and sightlines that are continually cut off by the circuitous routes that delineate the Walled City.Cushman 2018, p.126. He also photographed the conglomeration of cramped apartments, the illegal cages terraces, signboards, dentists offices and the informal networks of cables and pipes.
When Miyamoto returned to photograph Kowloon again in the fall of 1987, he paid for a helicopter to take him above the Walled City so that he could capture birds-eye-views of the fortification.Cushman 2018, p.129.
He published his first photobook on Kowloon Walled City in 1988, at Atelier Peyotl. When eventually its demolition was completed in 1994, Kowloon Walled City no longer existed as a reality. Miyamoto’s photographs continue to be an effective resource in its documentation; hence, the republication of the Kowloon Walled City photobook in 1997, 2009, and again in 2017.Cushman 2018, p.137.
Cardboard Houses Alongside with Miyamoto's project on Kowloon Walled City, the Cardboard Houses project is another instance of what he calls “handmade architecture” (tezukuri kenchiku).
After his own first sighting of cardboard houses in 1983, under a bridge near the Tsukiji fish market in Tokyo, Miyamoto began to photograph the so-called "homeless" houses, that have sprung up around Tokyo and in major Japanese cities. He defined these cardboard houses as archetypal human dwellings, made by "hunter-gathers" of the contemporary city :In 1990, he exhibited a work entitled “Tokyo’s Cardboard Houses” (Tokyo no danbōru no ie) in the group show “TOKYO,” organized by Itō Toshiharu at the Yurakuchō Seibu Art Forum. For the show, he compiled nearly 1-ton of cardboard to create four square mounds to which he attached his photographs of cardboard houses.Cushman 2018, p.104.
Miyamoto continued photographing the homes of the homeless for another nine years, and, in 2003, he published the images in a photobook plainly titled Cardboard Houses.Cushman 2018, p.107. The photographs presented in the book are from several surveys, in different regions of the world and photographed over several years: Tokyo (1983, 1984, 1988, 1994, 1995, 1996), New York (1991), Hong Kong (1993), Kawasaki (1994), Osaka (1994), London (1994) and Paris (1995).
In light of Miyamoto’s simultaneous engagement with “temporary ruins” at demolition sites, many art critics and curators in Japan have been quick to drawn a connection between the cardboard houses and ruined landscapes. Sakai Tadayasu suggests that cardboard houses actually “begin their life as ‘ruins’,” Sakai Tadayasu, “On the Ryūji Miyamoto Retrospective,” in Miyamoto Ryūji shashinten: Kowareyuku mono umareizuru mono (Ryūji Miyamoto Retrospective), trans. Stanley N. Anderson (Tokyo: Setagaya Bijutsukan, 2004), p.197. while Hayashi Yōji calls them “the ruins of consumer culture.” Hayashi, Yōji. “Miyamoto Ryūji Yokohama Pōtosaido Gyararii” (Miyamoto Ryūji at the Yokohama Portside Gallery). Bijutsu techo 693 (September 1994): p.149.Cushman 2018, p.118.
Inspired by his encounters with cardboard houses, in 2000, Miyamoto created his own small wooden box – a pinhole house (pinhōru no ie) – from which to view and photograph the urbanscape :Cushman 2018, p.197.When he first began using the pinhole house to create photographs, Miyamoto went to places where he had seen cardboard houses, such as Shinjuku and Akihabara in the middle of Tokyo. He “wanted to see those places from the perspective of the house, from the perspective of those who lived inside.” Cushman 2018, p.221.
Miyamoto has used exhibitions to convey the material dimensions of the pinhole house to viewers. In an exhibition at Akiyama Gallery in Tokyo in 2000, he constructed six pinhole houses and displayed the photographs inside the structures as they would have appeared at the time of their creation.Cushman 2018, p.232.
KOBE 1995 After The Earthquake