The Day the Dam Collapses

Hiroshi Watanabe

BOOK INFO 
Hardcover, 7.5 X 9.5 In. / 88 Pages / 66 Color 
ISBN 9780989798112 
List Price: $45.00 

“...a beautiful photographic poem about being human and accepting our mortality.”,
- Lenscratch, September 5, 2014

"...both ominous and touching...",
- Hyperallergic, November 1, 2014

Photographs by Hiroshi Watanabe
Text by Kristen Rian 

The latest body of work from California-based Japanese photographer Hiroshi Watanabe (born 1951), The Day the Dam Collapses consists-- unusually, for this artist--of digital photographs taken over the past five years since the birth of his son. Ranging in content from details of quotidian life to poetic visual metaphors, The Day the Dam Collapses paints the cycles of life as fleeting, fragile, and devastatingly ephemeral. In his introduction to the book, Watanabe writes: "the truth is, we are all living like the characters in a disaster movie. We know we may someday face a disaster or a terrible event, but we keep living calmly as we do not know what and when that might occur. But a disaster will surely come to us. And the largest disaster must be our death that we all have to face sometime in the future." Despite these looming intimations of mortality, Watanabe persists in recording and sharing a life fully felt.

Text by Kirsten Rian.