The vacant lot has its back to the sea

About the productJapanese

That image left a sediment at the bottom of my memory, and now it has become a certain heat. (From the included text)
This is the photo book "The Vacant Lot Has Its Back to the Sea" by Urabe Yuki, which won the grand prize from 138 entries at the 3rd Fugensha Photography Award held in 2023.

This work begins with the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011. Urabe was in Tokyo at the time, and felt a strong sense of discomfort with a society in which the media aired shocking images every day, fervently called for solidarity, and then forgot about it. Nine years later, as a pandemic spread across the world and words like "self-restraint" and "stay home" began to fly around, Urabe became interested in the seawalls that had been built in the disaster area for "peace of mind and safety," and visited them multiple times.

There, he was faced with a huge seawall that inorganically divided the sea from the land, and a windbreak forest that looked like it had been copied and pasted over and over again, and found himself dizzy by the stark contrast with the shocking images of the tsunami he had watched repeatedly on his monitor at the time. As if to fix that reality one photograph at a time, he aimed a shift lens at a monitor in his home in Tokyo and took long-exposure photographs of vacant lots along the coastline from Miyako City, Iwate Prefecture to Tokai Village, Ibaraki Prefecture, a model of the Earthquake Memorial Museum, the endless seawalls, and the hazy images of the tsunami that floated in his mind. (From the publisher)

This large-format photo book alternates between views of the eastern Japan coastline and images that are burned into the mind and will never leave your memory. It reflects the frustration and anger that Urabe felt toward society and himself, and will have a strong impact on those of us living after 2011.

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Product Information

Publisher Fugensha

release date 2024 / 06 / 30

Part numberKPHT10117W-9784908955303

Specification B4 variant (249mm x 312mm) / Softcover / Open back / 96 items

Notes

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