shashasha

Scorching flames, rising black smoke, beads of sweat streaming down sooty faces, men's angry voices echoing through the air, and the smell of fuel oil. Since my first visit to Bangladesh in 2012, I have repeatedly visited and photographed the people who make the "screws" of ships. They worked in a small, dark, cave-like workshop.

There, adults and children worked together to create a cold, hard metal by pouring molten red liquid, like magma, into the pitch-black ground, which was covered with iron sand. It was like a world of creation myths.

Stillness and motion, softness and hardness, light and shadow, regeneration and destruction.

The screw is produced using the tremendous labor of the workers as fuel.

Again and again, I was absorbed by the tremendous energy swirling in this small workshop and gazed at them as if devouring them.

― Akihito Yoshida

At the end of the book is a novel entitled “The Screw" written by novelist Ishii Shinji for this book. Design is by Tamon Yahagi, who has worked on many of Yoshida's photo books.

The cover photo was printed on a RISO-graph printing press, the title name was stamped, and the author's name was handwritten by Akihito Yoshida for each book.
The screws depicted in this book are all produced by hand, and each screw is slightly different from the others.