Jiro Takamatsu’s dynamic practice established him as a leading influence in the Japanese conceptual art movement of the 1960s and 70s. Spanning painting, sculpture, performance and photography, his work collapsed the boundaries between art and life while incorporating elements of Dada, Surrealism and Minimalism. In his Photograph of Photograph series, the artist hired a photographer to take pictures of his own family photographs. Via this closed-circle appropriation, Takamatsu removes the personal sentiment from these familial memories, adding a physical and emotional distance to the subject recorded. Like his American contemporary John Baldessari, Takamstu’s work recontextualizes vernacular imagery raising it to the level of fine art, while his documentation of the photograph as object calls to mind the work of another American photographer, Kenneth Josephson.
Other works from this series are in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, which has a close variant of this image; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; and Tate Modern, London.
