shashasha

In the black-and-white photographs of Katsuhiko Hashimoto's “Nostalgia,” small towns and villages across Japan - Nara, Tochigi, Chiba, Niigata, Nagasaki, Wakayama – appear to be part of a single place, an imagined ideal of rural Japan, composed of wooden buildings, old chimneys and narrow streets. Taken between 2020 and 2024, Hashimoto's photographs are less a documentation of actual architecture than of the feelings associated with it, almost entirely devoid of human life, yet imbued with a sense of familiarity and comfort.
It is his fourth book on rural townscapes in Japan, following “The Other Scenery” (2012), “A Distant Day” (2015) and “Nagi” (2019).

“I travel to towns I have never visited, driven by a spontaneous impulse when I think about them (…)
I am determined to capture the places that evoke memories of the past on camera. However, in this age, the towns are constantly being developed and the scenery is evolving rapidly – it is sad to witness the past fading away.”
― from Katsuhiko Hashimoto’s afterword