shashasha

Masafumi Sanai, born and raised in Shizuoka, presents an ode to his hometown.

Celebrated for his immediate and enigmatic style, Sanai’s photography capture ordinary scenes of everyday life in a pure, untainted manner that leave the viewer to search for their own meaning. Despite having started his photographic career in the 1990s, “Shizuoka-shi” (“Shizuoka Poetry”) is the first time that Sanai focused on the city in which he grew up, as it took special effort to shoot the city without Sanai’s own sentimentality or nostalgia enter into the process. That is not to say that the images in “Shizuoka-shi” are cold or emotionless—Sanai has again created a series of photographs that looks naturally out of the ordinary, captured in a playful and simple manner.

The book also includes an essay by Masafumi Sanai (in Japanese only).