Yasushi Kashima
TIFA 2025 Interview with Yasushi Kashima
1st Place winner in People, Professional, “Trial by Fire: 1,200 Years of Purification and Pro”
Can you introduce yourself and share a bit about your background in photography?
My name is Yasushi Kashima, and I am a photographer based in Japan. Across my work—whether landscapes, cultural rituals, or human presence—I explore how time, memory, and atmosphere shape the way we experience a place.
I began photography not with the intention of documenting events, but as a way to observe subtle transitions: mist moving through mountains, light appearing briefly in forests, or traditions continuing quietly over centuries. Over time, my focus expanded to include people—not as subjects separated from nature, but as part of it. My projects often sit between landscape and documentary, seeking moments where human belief and the natural world intersect.
The Toba Fire Festival is an ancient ritual shaped by danger, faith, and collective memory. What first drew you to document this ceremony?
What drew me to the Toba Fire Festival was its sense of inevitability. This ritual does not exist to be watched—it must be performed, regardless of danger.
Unlike festivals designed for celebration, this ceremony carries responsibility toward the community and the future. Observing it, I felt the same quiet intensity I have encountered in nature: something powerful, uncontrollable, yet deeply respected. I wanted to photograph the festival as a place where belief is not symbolic, but lived through physical action.
What choices did you make to avoid anchoring the series too firmly in a specific era?
I avoided visual elements that would clearly define the present.
Instead, I focused on gestures, expressions, and the interaction between people and fire—elements that have likely remained unchanged for generations.
My approach was similar to how I photograph landscapes: removing excess information so that time feels suspended. By limiting contextual details and working with restrained tones, I aimed to create images that do not belong to a single moment, but exist within a longer continuum of memory.
What does winning at the Tokyo International Foto Awards mean to you personally and professionally?
Personally, this recognition affirms a path I have followed quietly for many years. Much of my work is slow and contemplative, often unfolding outside moments of spectacle.
Professionally, receiving this award in the People category is especially meaningful. It confirms that my approach—treating people as part of a broader environment shaped by nature and belief—can resonate beyond borders. It encourages me to continue working at the intersection of landscape, culture, and human presence.
The festival is believed to reveal insights about harvests, weather, and fate. Do you think photography, in its own way, can also act as a form of prophecy or preservation for future generations?
Photography cannot foresee the future, but it can preserve intention. It records traces of belief—why people acted, endured, and trusted in something larger than themselves.
For future generations, these images may function as quiet markers of continuity. They do not predict what will come, but they remind us that certain values, fears, and hopes once mattered deeply. In that sense, photography becomes less about prophecy and more about responsibility to memory.