Rei Ushigaki took the photographs in his book “Ie no kaze” (The Winds of Home) between 2010 and 2021, during numerous visits to the city of Minamikyushu in Kagoshima Prefecture in the south of Japan. This is where the roots of Ushigaki’s family lie. After the death of his grandmother and grandfather, Ushigaki realized he knew very little about his family’s home, that he has not seen much of the region where his grandparents spent much of their lives.
His captivating series of black-and-white images—a succession of wide landscapes and singular details, important events and everyday nothings-acts as a photographic conversation with a place that is both strange and the source of one’s own roots, as a document of a continuing coming and going, of an almost-arriving and never-quite-leaving, of intimateness and distance.
