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“We are a landscape of all that we have seen.”
—Isamu Noguchi
During a recent sabbatical, I spent over five months in Japan. As part of a sponsored project, I made several trips to the Tohoku area to document the progress made since the great earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear disaster on the occasion of its seventh anniversary. I also spent over a month in Kyoto, where I traveled through the Kansai area to photograph Japanese gardens and partake in hanami, the festival of cherry blossoms. I originally produced two very separate bodies of work, but they ended up fitting together like two ends of a continuous spectrum. Some images chronicle slow recovery after a devastating natural disaster that shattered over 20,000 lives almost instantly. Other images reveal generations of careful and disciplined grooming, manipulation, and mastery over the landscape. Together, they illustrate a natural disaster’s cataclysmic erasure of centuries of construction and progress, counterposed with the gardener’s cultivation to create order from a chaotic world.
Minamisoma, pigmented archival print mounted to dibond, 32” x 44”, 2018
Inlet Overlook, lshinomaki
Inlet Overlook, lshinomaki, pigmented archival print mounted to dibond, 32” x 44”, 2018
The Rose Garden, Ogatsu, pigmented archival print mounted to dibond, 32” x 44”, 2018
Kenroku Koen, Kanazawa, pigmented archival print mounted to dibond, 32” x 44”, 2018
Ogatsu, pigmented archival print mounted to dibond, 32” x 44”, 2018
Saiho-Ji, Kyoto, pigmented archival print mounted to dibond, 32” x 44”, 2018
Kawa Elementary School, Ishinomaki
Kawa Elementary School, lshinomaki, pigmented archival print mounted to dibond, 32” x 44”, 2018
Sanzen-in, Kyoto, pigmented archival print mounted to dibond, 32” x 44”, 2018
Fotaba, Fukushima Prefecture 1, pigmented archival print mounted to dibond, 32” x 44”, 2018
installation view from the group exhibition Faculty Projects at Sullivan Galleries, featuring work from Erasure and Creation: Storied Scenes from Japan, 2018