Every year since 2011, Sachiko Kadoi has photographed the marshes around Nemuro at the beginning of spring. Her contemplative, slow-paced photographs depict scenes that usually pass unnoticed by the human eye: dead grass emerging from under a thawing layer of snow, naked trees forming a cold forest, vegetation slowly coming back to life, parts of animal carcasses. Nemuro is the last place in Japan where cherry blossoms bloom. Here, spring comes slowly, and the death of winter lingers for a while before nature comes back to life. In photographing these processes, Kadoi acts with deliberation and great care. Her photographs exude a reassuring sense of hope.
“A lot of things have changed over the past ten years, and my favorite area that I used to photograph is now lined with windmills and large solar panels. My photographs from Nemuro are a record of Nature’s time, which makes us feel that the life of a person passes in just a blink of an eye.”
― from Sachiko Kadoi’s afterword
