ZEN FOTO GALLERY

Hiroyoshi Yamazaki's “Around Lake Town” is a long-term photographic project documenting the development of Koshigaya Lake Town, a new town that has been under construction since 1997 in southeastern Koshigaya, Saitama Prefecture, and whose first residents arrived in 2008. Yamazaki's photographs of Koshigaya Lake Town depict landscapes, scenes, and views typical of Japan's suburban spaces - clean and orderly, heavy on asphalt and stone, with houses that seem to be copied into the landscape. In the early photographs at the beginning of the book, taken before the project really began, Yamazaki captured the landscapes as they were, shaped by a necessary compromise between nature and civilization. But Yamazaki's mission with “Around Lake Town” is not to condemn the new development. His photographs document life in Lake Town, families moving in, communities forming, the artificiality slowly becoming more human.

“During a photographic discussion event about his photobook ‘Funabashi Story,’ photographer Kazuo Kita mentioned that he finds the clutter and messiness of Funabashi inspiring, and it motivates him to continue photographing the city. But there is no clutter in Lake Town. When I told an editor that Iw as taking photographs of Lake Townm he said it must be boring. The houses and apartments look exactly as they appear in real estate advertisements, and there are no good places to drink […]
My photography at Lake Town is driven by curiosity: Is Lake Town sustainable? Having once been reset as a cleared land, Lake Town will soon celebrate twenty years since the town was first opened. What will the landscape look like in the next twenty years?”
― from Hiroyoshi Yamazaki’s afterword “Why do I take photographs of Lake Town”