Coastal Motifs — Special edition

COASTAL MOTIFS is the new book by Franco-Japanese photographer Tadashi Ono.

The signed book together with a 28 x 21 cm art print.
Limited edition of 20 copies.

On this coastline, the mountains meet the sea head-on, and for centuries that proximity shaped the life of the coastal towns. Since the tsunami of 11 March 2011 and the Fukushima nuclear disaster, concrete walls have been closing off the bays one after another. Built supposedly to protect lives, they cut off the view and, with it, an ancient relationship: where the gaze turns towards the sea, the sea can no longer be seen.

Tadashi Ono travels this coastline bay after bay. He photographs the construction sites, the seawalls, the land left fallow, and what grows around them. Coastal Motifs examines how, in the name of safety and control, the coastline and the relationship to the sea have been profoundly redrawn.

Tadashi Ono was born in Tokyo. He studied ecology and botany at Shinshu University before graduating from the École nationale supérieure de la photographie in Arles in 1991. He headed the Photography and Video department of Kyoto University of the Arts from 2011 to 2017, then joined the teaching staff of the ENSP in Arles.

His work has entered prestigious institutional collections, including those of the Frac Auvergne and the Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP), and has been exhibited at the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, the Rencontres d’Arles, KYOTOGRAPHIE, the Villa Noailles and the BnF.

Texts by Tadashi Ono, Christophe Catsaros and Shunsuke Hirose.
Trilingual book — French | English | Japanese