shashasha

Toshiya Watanabe’s photobook “Somewhere not Here” provides a brilliant way to experience the Japanese photographer’s eponymous series of magical realist images. Like few others, Watanabe is able to capture real landscapes—trees and plants feature heavily in his images heavily but human beings, the ocean and other subject also make appearances—and make them lose their sense of reality, to take them somewhere else, somewhere not here. The surrealistic images are not ends in themselves either; they speak to something in the depths of consciousness, ask us to pause, ponder and reflect.
Within the book, the many images of Watanabe’s series are presented at a large size, and the many foldout pages add to the sense that there is always something beyond the first glance, something unseen that is hidden just outside of our reality.

“Many of Watanabe’s works are full of emptiness, thus creating a moment to slow down, to feel the space in his works quieting the mind. Other works are full of details and engage the viewer to further explore the uneasy feeling that ‘something doesn’t add up.’”
― from Annemarie Zethof’s foreword