Akimichi CHIMURA

"SHAKAI"

Pages: 72 / photos: 62
Size: 300x220x12mm / hardcover
Price: 3,000JPY
Release Date: September 2012

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March 11th, 2011... that great earthquake caused tsunami to destroy a huge number of things and kill a great number of people, washing them together away to the ocean.  The scattered pieces of wreckage, shadowed with the people and their past lives, drifted on to the coast where I’d kept coming to take photographs.  A year after the unforgettable day that the earthquake occurred, the remains are still drifting ashore; especially when in winter the north wind blew to change the current, even more of those remains drifted ashore than right after the disaster, reminding us of that day even now. 

To me however, those remains were nothing special.  The earthquake disaster did not necessarily make them special to me, for my camera lens was simply directed to the articles coming ashore anew.  The drifted articles that came ashore before the earthquake and those that came after... I wonder what difference they make, for the only thing we are really sure about is that they were both thrown away from the society and its rules we depend on and that now they are just there, forgotten and unrecognized....

The world of infinity, imagined as if counting all the grains of sand in the Ganges River, is called “ 沙界 shakai (a metaphysical world of sand)” in Buddhist thought.  What I have been pursuing through my camera lens is a more secular and material world of the ragged sand and articles their world, or their story that can be named and called “砂界shakai (a realistic world of sand )” rather than the metaphysical “沙界shakai” in Buddhism.

What those lying there narrate however, is not just their story but ours, for they are what we created for ourselves.  The story may touch the essence of ourselves, or that of the society we create.  For the society, “社会shakai” in Japanese, is our deed that the worlds we each have in ourselves which are called our hearts get piled up and keep spinning out. 

(Excerpts from the author's postscript)