Photo Journal Monday: Hiroshi Watanabe

Grasshopper ©Hiroshi Watanabe

The Day the Dam Collapses

Disaster movies often begin with depictions of mundane life. The audience sense these scenes are precursors to terrible thing that might happen. What is important here is that the characters in the movie do not know while the audience anticipates the characters will be involved in a disaster.

Sacred Heart(Left); Swiss Hotel(Right) © Hiroshi Watanabe

The audience is like prophets who are looking at the people who are living peacefully only because they don't know. The truth is, we are all living like the characters in a movie. We keep living calmly as we do not know what and when a disaster might occur.

Newborn Baby(Left); NY Hotel(Right) © Hiroshi Watanabe

Feet & Shoes(Left); Dead Bird(Right) © Hiroshi Watanabe

But a disaster will surely come. And the largest disaster must be death that we all have to face. We are like people living at the base of a dam that has no outlet.  We are only vaguely aware that the dam will collapse some day when the dam cannot hold the weight of the water any longer.  With this frame of mind, I look at my own daily life, and I see many signs. 

School of Fish(Left); Praying Mantis(Right) © Hiroshi Watanabe

Shadow Sailor(Left); T-Rex(Right) © Hiroshi Watanabe

*Hiroshi Watanabe was born in Sapporo, Hokkaido, Japan, He graduated from the Department of Photography of Nihon University in 1975. He moved to Los Angeles, where He worked as a production coordinator for Japanese television commercials and later co-founded a Japanese coordination services company. He obtained an MBA from the UCLA Anderson Business School in 1993. Two years later, however, my earlier interest in photography revived, and he started to travel worldwide, extensively photographing what he found intriguing at each moment and place. As of 2000, he has worked full-time at photography.

You can find more of Hiroshi’s work here.