shashasha

“There I was amidst the color of gray which covered the whole sky.”

In his photobook “Into The Gray”, Tetsuo Kashiwada photographed the disastrous fires in Australia between September 2019 and February 2020. With forests and buildings burnt down, Kashiwada, who had lived in Australia as a student, found a scenery unlike any he had witnessed before. In neutrally-shot, almost documentary-like photographs, Kashiwada conveys the vastness of the fires without becoming distracted by their scale. Despite the destruction, he also found a certain beauty in the muted colors and enshrouded sceneries, as Kashiwada admits in his afterword. But with contrast comes hope: near the end of the book, colors return to the forest as fresh green leaves begin to grow amidst the burnt tree trunks, and people begin to restore their previous lives.

“These scenes are not from a world where the flames incessantly burn the forest, blazing in bright red like it’s reaching the end, nor are they from a world where rain falls, extinguishing the inferno to welcome the blue skies back.”
— from Tetsuo Kashiwada’s afterword

All texts in English.