Ryūji Miyamoto

Ryūji Miyamoto (宮本 隆司, ''Miyamoto Ryūji'', born 1947) is a Japanese photographer, best known as the “ruins photographer”. 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.

His early work focusing on the demolition of modern buildings led to the ''Architectural Apocalypse'' series. He later thematized what he calls "handmade architecture" (''tezukuri kenchiku'') 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 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.

His photography, however, is never about the negativity of ruins. As the title of his [https://www.setagayaartmuseum.or.jp/exhibition/special/detail.php?id=sp00120&set_lang=true 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. Provided by Wikipedia