Sohei Nishino

© Sohei Nishino. Paris, May 2007 - November 2008. Light jet print. 1558×1348 mmThis work by Sohei Nishino comes to us by way of Tim Atherton who alerted us to the wonderfully named Hippolyte Bayard's photography site.

Sohei Nishino walks cities, photographs them and assembles the photos into vast cognitive maps.  He states that this is 'the re-imagined city from my memory as layered icons of the city'.

Spectacularly unsuited to looking at on the screen, they are large, black and white pieces, 4 x 4' more or less.  Knowing the process, one can imagine what they might look like, as unbalanced and as true as all cognitive maps, studded with fragments of startling detail.  

The detail of Istanbul, below,  shows something of the method: like small narratives in the topography of memory complete with sky and ground, some buildings and spaces are made special by their disconnection from the logic of a conventional map.  This is what google maps has liberated us from: the misleading veracity of the aerial view.

© Sohei Nishino. Detail, Istanbul Diorama