Hiroyuki Masuyama

The Japanese photographer Hiroyuki Masuyama (born 1968 in Tsukuba, Japan) studied at the Tokyo National School of Fine Arts and Music from 1987 to 1991. On a DAAD scholarship, he attended the Düsseldorf Art Academy from 1995 to 1999 and then studied at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne until 2001.   

Stopping time, capturing a moment – that is the driving force behind photography. But how is it possible to depict a continuum, a succession of times, in a single image? Masuyama has found his own artistic answer to this question. With a highly concentrated yet holistic view of the world, he captures change. Continuously, sometimes for years, he accompanies and documents selected places. He assembles the resulting photographs in such a way that the change manifests itself in a single image. Tokyo-London was created during an eleven-hour flight from Tokyo to London. Every minute, Masuyama took a photograph from the window of the plane. The digital montage created a spatially condensed landscape formation that cannot be seen with the naked eye. The time of the flight and the space overflown merge into one image. The linearity of space and time is suspended.  

Many of the guests at the Munich Re Guest House have travelled far themselves. They may also have flown to Munich and taken similar images with them in their memories.