SAKURA RIVER Atsushi Fujiwara

Internationally acclaimed photographer Atsushi Fujiwara has broken a five-year silence to release his very first color photobook, Sakuragawa.

The project began in the summer of 2020, amidst the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic. Finding himself on a long-term stay at a hotel in the northern Kanto region, Fujiwara intuitively began capturing the scenery, as if guided by the gentle "Sakura River" flowing right beside him. Later discovering that this very location is the setting of the classic Noh play Sakuragawa, he felt a profound connection to the world of Noh—a thread that began with his previous work, Semimaru—and used it to shape the vision of this project.

As photography critic Kenji Takazawa notes in the afterword, this work captures an "impermanent world where the sacred and the profane intermingle, transient as falling cherry blossoms." Photographed during the unique suspension of time caused by the pandemic, the riverside scenes Fujiwara quietly observed resonate with the subtle grace of classical theater, radiating an undeniable value that only photography can preserve.