shashasha

“Do not be afraid, yet do not make light of nature. Always keep the gods in mind with prayer...

Imagine a huge piece of rock, like a mountain, that you wanted to take a part of home. How would you do it? If you had a hammer, like a geologist, you could wing it down and crack off a piece to put in your pocket. If you noticed a fissure in the rock, you could put a wedge or chisel in to obtain a larger piece. They say that when Hannibal of Carthage crossed the Alps with his elephants, he made fires around huge rocks and poured water over the heated surfaces so that they split, and by repeating this was able to create a road for the troops to advance along. With hammer, chisel, wedge, fire and water, rock can be turned into small, transportable pieces. But what if we need a huge amount of these broken rocks? What if we need enough to make a city out of them? Hammers and chisels are out of the question. Fire and water are not sufficient. We need greater force. That is demanded by our modern age: a force as big as our modern desires."

-Naoya Hatakeyama, excerpt from afterword, BLAST

Naoya Hatakeyama’s BLAST, brings together a body of work which explores the power and relationship between nature and man. Having begun the series in 1995, Hatakeyama’s BLAST series presents scenes taken around the many limestone quarries around Japan which captures the momentary conversion of power used in mining by aggressive industrial explosives. Here, Hatakeyama beautifully encapsulates these parallels including a detailed afterword written in retrospect of the Great East Japan Earthquake.