Inspiration 2021.01.01
Tsunehisa Kimura’s Visual Scandals by Photomontage, Tsunehisa Kimura (木村恒久), 1979
I came to know of Tsunehisa Kimura after being struck by the cover of Zonoscope by Cut/Copy in 2011. The album artwork features a cropped image of Manhattan transformed into an enormous waterfall captured and startled my imagination with its environmental juxtaposition of nature and human-made. Apocalyptic or serene? I had to feed my curiosity.
I soon discovered that the artwork, entitled Waterfall, was created in 1979 by Tsunehisa Kimura, an influential artist and graphic designer who lived in Japan from 1928–2008 and specialized in surreal collages depicting eerily familiar apocalyptic futures. This particular collage began it’s life on the cover of ‘Parco View 4: Tsunehisa Kimura’s Visual Scandals By Photomontage’ which was published by Parco, Tokyo in 1979.
Within the glossy pages, punk sci-fi compositions are tediously collaged using incomprehensible methodologies pre-dating Photoshop to create jarring images — visual scandals — as seen through the lens of his ‘Kimura Camera.’
