Akichi wa umi ni se o mukete iru - Vacant Space | Hiroki Urabe | Fugensha 2024 [SIGNED]

"This work "The Vacant Lot Has Its Back on the Sea" originates from the Great East Japan Earthquake on March 11, 2011. Urabe, who was in Tokyo at the time, felt a strong sense of discomfort in a society where the media aired shocking images every day, enthusiastically called for "solidarity," and then forgot about it.

Nine years later, as the 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 several times.

There, he says he was dizzy at the stark contrast between the huge seawall that inorganically separates the sea from the land and the monotonous scenery of the windbreak forest that looked like it had been copied and pasted repeatedly, and the shocking images of the tsunami that he had repeatedly watched on the monitor at the time.

As if to solidify that feeling one by one, he took long-exposure photographs at his home in Tokyo, using a shift lens to shoot images 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 images of the tsunami that floated in his mind like a mist. 

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 powerful impact on those of us living after 2011." - from publisher's statement.

This book won the 3rd Fugensha Photo Award in 2024. The available copies are signed in the colophon page.