“Beyond 2023–2011” Photos by Taishi Hirokawa

About the exhibition

FUJIFILM SQUARE is hosting Taishi Hirokawa's “Beyond 2023–2011” photo exhibition from September 22 (Friday) to October 12 (Thursday), 2023. Since launching his career in 1974, Hirokawa has made a highly reputed name for himself as a photographer with many amazing photographs taken from unique perspectives, to note his “Sonomama Sonomama” series of inordinary portaits of rural folks dressed in designer brands and his “Babel: Ordinary Landscapes” in which he questions the relationship between human existence and the living earth through landscapes that juxtapose man-made structures and the natural environment, all the while pursuing a broad range of activities via diverse media including fashion, advertising and other commericial photography and cinematography.

Taishi Hirokawa also cares about communities. Having learned of the unimaginable damage caused by the tsunami that was triggered by the Great East Japan Earthquake in 2011, Hirokawa asked himself what he could do to help. As soon as that became clear to him, he jumped into action, loaded up his car with emergency supplies and headed north without any set destination. While in the stricken area, the sight of albums and photos floating on the yet unreceded waters and people searching for family photos weighed heavily on his heart. So, in one corner of the ill-fated Kesennuma City Office, he began offering to take family portraits for free to those who desired them in October 2011. He has continued this service every year since then till now, except during the period that the Covid-19 pandemic shut him down.

Parallel to that, Hirokawa also took fixed-point observations in and around Kamaishi, Rikuzentakata and Kesennuma over the ensuing twelve years.

This exhibition presents for the first time both the fixed-point observations of devastated landscapes and portraits of the people that Hirokawa took in the aftermath of the disaster between 2011 and now. It shows the destruction that Mother Nature caused and the time-consuming process of recovering a way of life that was turned on its head, and should provide ample opprtunity to think about what has happened over the past twelve years and ponder what's next.