A BIRD Blast #130 Naoya Hatakeyama

A newly revised edition of A BIRD BLAST #130 by photographer Naoya Hatakeyama, originally published by Taka Ishii Gallery in 2006.

Part of Hatakeyama’s seminal BLAST series—a 20-year project capturing the explosive demolition of limestone quarries—this work was born from a moment of pure serendipity. While reviewing negatives of rock fragments shattering in a matter of seconds, Hatakeyama discovered a sequence of frames where a bird unexpectedly flew across the sky. The title "#130" denotes the 130th blast he had photographed.

Operating the camera remotely from a safe distance, Hatakeyama was unable to look through the viewfinder at the moment of the explosion. When he first saw these images—the result of collective human effort and a chance natural occurrence—he was deeply moved. In his later book, Speaking Photographs, he reflected that this single moment made his two decades of visiting the mines worthwhile.

The book design is by Asuka Wakita, a former apprentice of Shin Sobue, who designed Hatakeyama’s 2013 monograph BLAST.