Naoya Hatakeyama
Friday, 20 March 2026
Work from Tsunami Trees.
“Tsunami Trees, which Hatakeyama has been working on since 2018 and has culminated in a photobook in 2024, is a group of works documenting the trees and landscapes left behind on the Pacific coast that retain the traces of the tsunami. In 2017, six years after the Great East Japan Earthquake, Hatakeyama came across a walnut tree on a riverbank upstream from the Kesen River, which flows through his hometown of Rikuzentakata. The tree, which Hatakeyama calls ‘half a tree’, has abundant foliage on its left half, but the trunk of the right half was damaged by the objects from the Tsunami, preventing water and nutrients from reaching the dead branches. Driven by the urge to find similar trees, Hatakeyama traveled around the Tohoku region with the help of his acquaintances, and when he came across trees that had been affected by the disaster in various ways, he recorded them with his large format camera. The Tsunami Trees captured in the photographs bring us back to our awareness of the relationship between trees and people; at times the trees are revered as a steadfast presence, and at other times they are inconsiderately cut down and used. The newly constructed seawalls and highways around the freestanding trees also provide a glimpse of the time that has passed since the disaster, evoking our individual memories.” – Taka Ishii Gallery