彼の地の神 -Native land / Folk beliefs / 2011
Type C print
20 Pieces
Competition Artist @ Tsuchizawa Art Festival
This is aseries of work that I created in 2011 in Iwate Prefecture, Japan. Iwate is north of Tokyo. This area was only slightly damaged from the 2011 earthquake. I talked with people who are living there, and I tried to learn about the region. I learned about two ways of life.
One way of living is based on animatism. The residents are living with their nature, and they believe that some gods live on their land. The land is everything to them. They owe everything to the land. I felt that their ties to the land are very strong. In this work I wanted to focus on this minority lifestyle.
The majority lifestyle is a capitalistic way of living. People put a lot of work into leveling a hill or mountain and then constructing many roads and an artificial dam in the leveled area. The number of rice field was decided from the Japanese Government. It was not the resident’s voice.
When I do a photography project, I usually also do a workshop, which evolves in parallel with my photography. The theme is ‘for the future children: for the unborn.’ This program is intended for elementary school students.
First, I tell the children, ‘Please look for the oldest photographs in your home. We have one condition. The photo should be taken in this village; tourist resort and studio photos are no good. And if somebody in your family knows about the photographs, please ask them to tell you all about them.’
In the case of this town, most old pictures were taken before the 2nd World War. This city is very old, a castle
town since the 8th century. It developed earlier than the other areas. I knew that a lot of people there were wealthy. Many homes had high-quality appliances, many people had cameras
from the early 20th century.
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People assume that images can only tell part of the story. I believe that photography needs words to understand the whole story. My feeling is that photographs benefit a greatly from the concurrent presence of an oral tradition. This is one of my major goals in my work.
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土沢駅周辺から五分も車を走らせると、見渡す限りの田んぼが広がる。町の中心に猿が石川が早池峰山から骨太く流れ、町を囲むように山が連ねる。
町の歴史を知った上でこの町の撮影をしたいと思うものの、町の広さと奥深い歴史に翻弄され、その全体像がなかなかつかめなかった。人類が誕生する前から早池峰山は隆起しており、土地の豊か故に古くから人が住み始めた場所であることが想像の中心だった。
