shashasha

With “Landscape around the uncompleted,” the Japanese photographer Yu Kawasaki offers a deconstruction of the landscape of his home region of Kumano, a sacred place known for its lush and beautiful natural scenery, and questions the framework of landscape photography. In two thematically related series, each approaching the center of the book from a different direction, Kawasaki explores Kumano’s suburban sceneries without pretense or needless romanticization, and foregrounds the genre of the landscape through photographs taken through a bus window during a six-and-a-half-hour ride through Kumano, from Shingu to Yamato-Yagi.
Despite the inclusion of visual aberrations introduced by the bus window or blurred photographs caused by the shaking of the bus, these photographs still radiate a certain beauty, especially when viewed in connection with each other or in contrast to the other series of images, which treat Kumano’s scenery with a more realistic and issue-aware attitude.
The center of the book consists of two texts written by the poet Shino Kuraishi and Kawasaki himself (both in Japanese only).