Published by MACK in 2016, The Narcissistic City presents Takashi Homma’s sustained inquiry into how cities are seen—and how they teach, shape, and organise the act of looking. Rather than identifying a particular metropolis, the book constructs an elusive urban image from fragments gathered through camera obscura built in metropolitan areas of Japan and the United States. Its subject is therefore not a city as geographic index, but the city as image, symbol, desire, and psychological condition.

The camera obscura is both method and metaphor. Images caught inside its dark chamber produce a shadow world: an urban reality suspended, inverted, and made strangely self-aware. Repetition and reflection become structural principles, recalling Narcissus’s pool and the city’s fixation on its own image. Glass, modular forms, and recurring visual echoes suggest an environment that is at once intimate and inaccessible, familiar and resistant to comprehension. Homma’s fragments do not resolve the city into a readable whole; they preserve its instability and its capacity to trap those who move through it.

At 112 pages, the volume is a concentrated artist’s book whose significance lies in the precision of its conceptual frame and photographic procedure. Its city is assembled rather than documented, allowing the work to move beyond conventional urban description toward a meditation on perception itself. For collectors, the book deserves attention as a distinctive collaboration between optical device and photographic sequencing: a publication in which the means of making the images determines the character of the world they depict. It also belongs within Homma’s wider practice as a Japanese photographer, following his recognised engagement with urban space while taking a more abstract and reflexive direction.