Still Life

Masato Ninomiya photography

Eden

The American novelist Mark Twain, best known for his The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, also wrote some short stories called The Diaries of Adam and Eve. As I read them, I saw the Garden of Eden, from which Adam and Eve were banished for eating the forbidden fruit, not as a Biblical reference but as something that can stand for Planet Earth and our natural environment today. What do we have here - a utopia or a dystopia? In ancient Japan, people believed that the gods dwelt in all things. Yet there are places where, although trees grow there in abundance, large quantities of waste are buried in the ground and attempts to restore the land are presently under way. I don’t suppose that this series will lead to some sort of solution to this problem. One thing we can say is that even seemingly untouched natural landscapes have been altered by human hand. Aren’t these altered landscapes just as good as natural ones?