shashasha

Manabu Someya’s photobook “Hotare” forms a quiet journey through Japan’s seaside towns and rural areas that is remarkable for its unremarkableness. Traveling to and wandering through these towns, Someya (who quit working as a freelance photographer in 2015 to focus on his own photography) pays attention only to his own sensations and feelings to choose and frame his images, rather than choosing a cerebral approach. His “Hotare” series is an undramatic work, with village corners, street lamps, house facades, streets and shores photographed like character studies of a specific places. It is this unagitatedness that shows Someya’s maturity as a photographer, his confidence in the essence of photography that make it a joy to look at the photographs in “Hotare” again and again.