Atelier EXB‘s new monograph, Shima no Ama, Kusukasu Uraguchi, accompanies the exhibition presented this summer at the Rencontres d’Arles.
For several centuries, ama – Japanese fishermen-divers – have nourished the Japanese imagination. These freedivers collect abalone, shells and algae, the sale of which ensures them financial autonomy within their household. Since the late 1950s and for more than thirty years, Kusukazu Uraguchi (1922-1988) photographed them in the Shima region, along the Pacific coast in northern Japan. The result of significant research work among nearly 40,000 negatives – almost all unpublished – this remarkable archive of landscapes, portraits and underwater views tells both the daily life and the particular place of the amateur community. within Japanese society.