In his Blast series (1995–2010), Naoya Hatakeyama captured successive moments in the blasting of limestone at a quarry. Using a 35mm camera placed on a tripod, he used a remote-control device to manually trigger a shutter with a speed of 1,000th of a second as a technician triggered the blast. Hatakeyama coordinated with an explosives expert, who accurately predicted where the shrapnel from the blasted boulders would fly. For Hatakeyama, the photographing of Blast has been an invaluable experience that has allowed him to reexamine photography’s fundamental technology to capture an instant.

In creating his Blast photographs, Hatakeyama was inspired by the stop-motion photographs created in the 19th century by Eadweard Muybridge, who pictured animal and human motions in sequence through the use of multiple cameras. (His work Movement of the hand; beating time is shown toward the opposite end of this exhibition.)

After the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011, which gravely affected and washed away his hometown in Iwate and numerous lives there, Hatakeyama stopped creating Blast photographs, as they remind him of the grave damages caused by the natural disaster.