EXHIBITION

5th January - 30th March 2026

in my room 6x6Ryudai Takano

It has been decided that IN MY ROOM, originally published twenty years ago, will be reissued. For this new edition, the in my room 6×6 series—photographed during the same period—will be newly included. This series consists of photographs that were taken as a kind of supplementary practice while I was working on what would later be compiled as In My Room.

At the time, my primary camera was a large-format 4×5 film camera. Its structure was extremely old-fashioned: it was difficult to use handheld, and it did not allow for continuous shooting while looking through the viewfinder. Yet precisely because of these inconveniences, it had the advantage—born of constraint—of being able to capture an extended duration of time within a single frame. I believed in that potential and chose to use it, though its lack of responsiveness when encountering a moment I wanted to photograph was also a source of frustration. Eventually, I began using a somewhat smaller 6×6 camera in parallel.

With increased mobility, a photographer’s sensibility tends to be reflected more directly in the image. At that time, my aim was to fix others onto the photographic surface as “others,” and therefore I was extremely wary of my own sensibility—more precisely, my own emotions—being projected into the image. For this reason, I positioned these photographs as “test shots” intended to explore “other possibilities,” and at the time of shooting I had no intention of making them public.

However, as time passed, I began to sense a certain potential in what appears here: “a record of the time I spent with them” (which is not necessarily a record of them). In 2006, I therefore produced a small number of handmade books using a copy machine. Since then, however, I never revisited the work, and twenty years have passed with it remaining buried.

This will be the first time the prints are exhibited together as a group. Looking again at the photographs from that period, I am newly aware of how differences in method affect the image, while at the same time feeling the strange sense that photographs exist independently of the photographer’s intentions or will.

February 2026
Ryudai Takano


Ryudai Takano

Photographer. Born in Fukui Prefecture in 1963. Since 1994 he has pursued artistic work on the theme of sexuality. He received the Kimura Ihei Award for his photobook IN MY ROOM (2005), which attempted to visualize ambiguities that lie between binary oppositions such as female/male and homosexual/heterosexual.

Subsequently, he has produced works that examine sexual desire—“a problem of the lower body”—in relation to identity and social norms, including the series How to Ride a Man, which explores the same theme through a pornographic format, and Oretachi (Me and…), in which the unguarded expression of sexuality resulted in police intervention.

Other series include Yokotarau Rough, a collection of bodily images with “no market value,” and Kasubaba, which photographs uniquely Japanese urban spaces that are extremely familiar yet overlooked, both questioning hierarchies of value in visual representation.

Since the Great East Japan Earthquake of 2011, he has engaged in various projects centered on the theme of shadows. In 2021, the National Museum of Art, Osaka held his solo exhibition Ryudai Takano: Daily Photographs 1999–2021. In 2022 he received the Minister of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology’s Art Encouragement Prize (Fine Arts Division, 72nd edition) and the Domestic Photographer Award at the 38th Higashikawa Awards. In 2025, his solo exhibition Ryudai Takano: Kasubaba — To Survive This Ordinary Day was held at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum as the first exhibition commemorating the museum’s 30th anniversary. more