shashasha

With “Kizu, Mitame”, Kota Kishi presents a 15-year long visual record of day laborers and homeless people in poverty-stricken neighborhoods in Osaka, Tokyo and Yokohama. Photographing his subjects unstaged and unaltered, Kishi tries to use the camera as a weapon against despair and loneliness. Sometimes his photographs manage to put us in the shoes of their subjects, other times we can simply look. But always Kishi engaged his subjects as equals. Time has been cruel to the neighborhoods of Kamagasaki, Sanya and Kotobukicho. Kishi photographed them and their inhabitants to show us the wounds of our society.

The book concludes with an afterword by Kota Kishi as well as two essays written by Shigemi Takahashi and Shino Kuraishi. Kota Kishi’s afterword includes an English translation, while Takashi’s and Kuraishi’s texts are only available in Japanese.