Signed; Atsushi FUJIWARA - Nangokusho - 2013

Atsushi Fujiwara följer sin farfars steg genom södra Japan, ledd av sin bok med tanka-dikter kallad Nangokusho.

I ”Nangokusho” finns en lyrisk känsla av ensamhet, en jakt på förlorade rötter, Atsushis öga översätter poetiska verser till visuella bildspråk, han jagar det osynliga, det länge försvunna.

En långsam vandring genom tomma gator, järnvägar och bakgårdar, Nangokusho är en tyst hyllning till de södra landskapen i Japan.


"The photographs speak for themselves. In the critique of photography, I make it a general rule to comment on the background from which the photographs arose.

If these were paintings, the past might be portrays from memory or imagination, but as regard this collection, photography will capture only what is currently there.

Today, Kagoshima and beautiful Okinawa are dramatically different from how Tohmon (nd: art-name of Atsushi’s grandfather) saw them, and there is nothing remaining of that now.

Fujiwara Atsushi undertook to pursue sceneries that no longer exist. If the reader should sense a certain emptiness from these photographs, this must be understood to be the emptiness of post-war Japan.”

Extract from Akira Hasegawa’s afterword.

SIGNED