A Japanese Photographer Traces How Cities Are Built and Destroyed | The New Yorker

Sometime in the nineteen-eighties, riding the monorail into Tokyo, Naoya Hatakeyama had an epiphany about limestone—namely, that it was everywhere, except in the vast holes where it used to be. Blast after blast, truckload by truckload, humanity had embarked on an elaborate limestone-relocation project, otherwise known as “construction.” What once belonged to the landscape had been prized out and spun into cities. In a violent reverie, Hatakeyama imagined pulverizing every building and highway in Japan. If he could return every last spoonful of dust to the quarry from whence it came, he could restore the land, and, along with it, a vision of the past. “The quarries and the cities,” he later wrote, “are like negative and positive images of a single photograph.”