Isolated Places Keizo Kitajima

Keizo Kitajima (b. 1954) emerged under Daido Moriyama, working through the self-run Shinjuku gallery CAMP and his self-published Photo Express: Tokyo, and won the Kimura Ihei Award in 1983. Across his career he has pursued the record of cities, people and places: the raw energy of 1980s New York, Okinawa's base town of Koza, the collapsing Soviet Union in USSR 1991, Eastern Europe, and the long-running frontal-portrait series PORTRAITS. ISOLATED PLACES was presented in 2012 at Rat Hole Gallery in Omotesando, Tokyo. It marks the Kitajima of the 2010s, who moved from his early grainy black-and-white snapshots toward meticulous large-format color descriptions of landscape and place. The title's sense of "isolated places" suggests an attention to stilled terrain that still bears the traces of human activity—resonant with its timing one year after the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and Fukushima disaster. This direction would soon open into his nationwide series Untitled Records. Because standalone documentation of this specific project is scarce online, this note stays cautiously within the artist's verifiable context and manner. It reads as a threshold work between two phases.