
Sleeping Trees
- Publisher
- Akaaka Art Publishing
- Year
- 2022
- ISBN
- 978-4-86541-159-1
- Specifications
- Hardcover
219 x 205 mm
160 pages
Book design by Chikako Suzuki
The first photobook by Sayaka Uehara, born in Okinawa and photographing in the place where she lives again. Walking through familiar streets, or taking a bus to another town, she makes pictures in which almost no people appear: a mannequin's fingers, restaurant seats, the shadow of an aircraft grazing a jukebox, a cloth-bound Bible, a fast-food sign. Ordinary scenes hold the traces of human lives and seem to speak in a voiceless voice, as ashtrays and flowerpots left behind reveal the silhouettes of those who were there. The landscape keeps hidden traces and layers of history and remains after existences vanish, pointing to circuits of complicated time and the pain beneath silence. The title evokes the silhouettes of the trees in the book and especially the ginnemu, which grows everywhere in Okinawa and is said to have been sown by the American military after the war to camouflage the destruction; its pattern gives the fence-like cover.