Engrossed in the Ocean’s Mundanity – Takashi Homma’s “New Waves”

At first glance, his most recent series of work, titled “New Waves”, seems to fit into his approach, but somehow something doesn’t feel quite right. Perhaps I have been spoiled by my upbringing in Hawaii where the an appreciation for the ocean’s beauty is constant, despite being clichéd. Perhaps my time spent working a surfing magazine has exposed me to too many variations on the sea’s glory and power — all manifestations presented as one half of the dichotomy of human and nature as surfers ride the sea’s undulations from birth to death. I am numb, my heart frozen, struck mute by too much experience, my senses so dulled by the infinite stimuli of the city that the purity or simplicity of nature has no effect any more.

128 pages of photos of waves taken at various locations around the world from the Aleutian to Hawaiian Islands over a period of several years create a sense of mundanity out of the single beautiful moment when waves crash and turn into foam. It is as if you were standing with Homma on the shore, watching, your mind lulled into a daze by the repetition, enjoying a feeling of nothingness that only the simplicity of the ocean can bring.

The photo book, so the theory goes, recreates this experience, genericizing it by removing all evidence of place to create a meta-place that reflects the empty mind. Or so it should – in fact, to the book’s detriment not all evidence is removed, as the editors have referred to Homma’s locales in the foreword). Then there is the exhibition, with sleek acrylic-paneled prints of selected photos. You can see in detail the movement of the spray, the shadows cast by the dusk and dawn light, and how similar each moment is to the next.

The subject is indeed mysteriously fascinating, but the photographs themselves are no more than catalysts that leave me looking for excuses rather than reasons why such a body of work should come from this photographer. “New Waves” simply expresses the obvious–the solitude of the sea that is welcomed by those who visit it. Nothing new is revealed, all I can really see in these “New Waves” is one photographer’s take on a subject explored to death by the surf photography genre.