FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEKOTARO NUKAGA‘Gold Rush Alaska’
Gentaro Ishizuka

The History of Alaska’s Gold Rush, Sculpted by Narrative

KOTARO NUKAGA, Tennoz is pleased to present ‘Gold Rush Alaska,’ an exhibition showcasing the works ofGentaro Ishizuka, from March 23 to May 18.
This exhibition is a tie-in with Ishizuka’s art book Gold Rush Alaska, scheduled to be published by prestigious
German publisher Steidl. His book was selected for publication as the winner of Steidl Book Award Japan in 2016,a dummy book award held in conjunction with the 8th TOKYO ART BOOK FAIR. Steidl is revered globally as oneof the premier publishers of art books, trusted by eminent artists around the world for its uncompromising quality
and attention to detail. Gerhard Steidl, its founder, personally selected Ishizuka’s work for the Grand Prix fromaround 4,000 entries. Now, after undergoing many years of painstaking development, Gold Rush Alaska is finally
going to print.
Ishizuka’s practice is concerned with reinterpreting the spatiality of photographic expression. In the Gold Rush
series, he sets out to “sculpt as history” the gold rush phenomenon that occurred in late 19th-century Alaska. This
upcoming exhibition will showcase 14 photographic works that had been unpublished (three were included in agroup exhibition at the Pola Museum of Art in 2019), along with three photographic sculpture pieces that bring theimages into three-dimensional forms.
The gold rush in question took Alaska by storm at the end of the 19th century, following the discovery of the
precious metal in various locations around the area. Suddenly, swarms of prospectors drawn by the promise ofwealth arrived in this region, previously home only to indigenous hunter-gatherers living modestly in small
settlements. Cultural anthropologist and critic Ryuta Imafuku, who is Professor Emeritus at Tokyo University ofForeign Studies, opened his essay for Ishizuka’s art book Gold Rush Alaska as follows [English by author]:

The Gold Rush is the ruin of history, the ruin of memory. The ruin of history decays, but the ruin of memory
haunts us forever. It not only haunts, but procreates. Procreates something new, something unknown.
Something extraordinary, astonishing microscopic slices of reality. We are surprised to realize that there is somuch tenacity and passion in these ruins. A never-before-seen “history fetus” is about to appear in thisworld.
Meanwhile, Shozo Fujita—a Japanese political scientist and historian of ideas—remarks in Photography andSociety on the Parisian sights that caught the eyes of French photographer Eugène Atget:

The movements implied by “what is left behind” is subtle. The very idea of “what is left behind” rests uponits being surrounded by that which has already vanished. It has not been artificially rid of its surroundings;
rather, it is left behind precisely insofar as it yet retains those vanished surroundings. It is also this that

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASEKOTARO NUKAGA

throws into relief all the relationships it shared with what—and who—had once surrounded it. *Ishizuka’s work too tackles this very theme of “what was left behind,” and the vanished surroundings that it
retains: the phenomenon that was the gold rush, and humanity’s fanatical lust for precious gold. This, surely, iswhat Ishizuka is conveying with a vivid reality, and the “history fetus” waiting to emerge.
Known for diving into the great wild with his large-format camera to capture the world in all its fine detail, with theGold Rush series Ishizuka brings to the fore his singular gift as a storyteller. Mr. Steidl, who is known for his
fastidious attention to the editing of narrative in art books, is said to have unreservedly approved of Ishizuka’sediting and left it virtually untouched to the surprise of all, a testament to its narrative strength.
The series is composed of three broad categories of images: landscape photographs capturing abandonedbuildings and equipment on the verge of being swallowed up by nature; tableaux comprising miscellaneous
items, such as animal bones and postcards, that were left inside the derelict buildings; and reproductions ofimages from photographer Eric A. Hegg’s documentation of Alaska’s gold rush.
Generally speaking, stories are told through depiction and narration. Ishizuka’s landscapes and tableaux depict thegold rush in different ways: the former illustrates the vastness of the environment, so inhospitable to humanhabitation, and of the temporal divide between the gold rush and our present day; the latter depicts the longdissipated frenzy of those days, the disappearance of both the prospectors and the chroniclers of the gold rush,and the fact that here too, just like in the world beyond it, the past continues to weather away. The reproductions
images, meanwhile, serve to narrate those events in the present day, bringing the story forward towards thepresent rather than leave it left behind in the distant past. Ishizuka skillfully arranges and edits the visuallanguages afforded by each of these types, engendering at their overlap something beyond mere documentation.
If time is to be understood as moving forward, and history as lying behind us, passed and gone, this is perhaps
because history is recounted by people other than ourselves. Ishizuka points his large-format camera forward to
take in “what is left behind”—but as something that lies up ahead, and in that sense, not yet consigned to history.
What Ishizuka thus demonstrates in Gold Rush Alaska is the very act of historization through photography. That isto say, by depicting and narrating what was left behind, he is sculpting that fetus of history in order to present it tous. The photographic sculpture pieces that have been newly produced for this exhibition can be seen as anextension of this concept.

* Fujita, Shozo. Fujita Shōzō chosakushū daikyūkan: Shashin to shakai shōshi [Photography and Society: A ShortHistory, The Collected Works of Shozo Fujita, Volume 9]. Tokyo: Misuzu Shobo, 2003, p. 14.

Gentaro Ishizuka Interview Video on Youtube