shashasha

The photobook “Spinning a Yarn” began with a throw-away idea suggested by Munemasa Takahashi’s friend as they were driving along the coast. Takahashi should take photos of “things that float in water,” the friend suggested. “Maybe I will give it a try sometime,” Takahashi said.

Takahashi met his friend as part of the Salvage Memory project, which helped return photographs to their owners after the 2011 earthquake and tsunami. A while later, Takahashi lost his friend to suicide.
The idea still in his head, Takahashi began searching for things to include in such a series. Life went on, Takahashi got married, became the father of a daughter. “Here came my turn to take our own family photographs, just like those numerous ones that I cleansed in the aftermath of the earthquake,” he writes in his afterword. Little by little, the series grew, and “every time a new photo was taken, in association with the existing ones, it slightly changed the entire meaning.”
A pensive, multi-layered document of life’s many unexpected facets.

“When I responded to him saying I would sometime try with “things that float on water,” I never expected it would eventually get related to me photographing my own child. And now, what the words he uttered eight years ago allude to also feels different from before.”

All texts included in Japanese and English translation.