Kanazawa Void

by Steven Seidenberg (Photographer), Yoko Kinoshita (Contributor), Makoto Shin Watanabe (Contributor)

Kanazawa Void is photographer Steven Seidenberg's visual essay on the devolution of the modern city, as manifest in the built environment of the provincial cultural center of Kanazawa, Japan. Referred to as "little Kyoto" for its remarkable preservation of pre-war wooden structures (the second largest city–after Kyoto–to avoid bombing or destruction by fire in the recent past), Kanazawa does not have the central place in the Japanese religious and cultural imagination that buoys the economy and preservation of its larger cousin. As the older generation of Kanazawans dies off and their progeny seek opportunities in larger industrial centers, many of the city's structures fall into disuse, disrepair and ultimately demolition, leaving open spaces throughout the urban landscape. Although this problem is not particular to any one city in Japan or elsewhere, Seidenberg finds in Kanazawa's unique juxtaposition of traditional and modern a vehicle for his visual reflections on emptiness and time. As with all of Seidenberg's work, these richly detailed, formally austere compositions are absent any intimation of human portrait or bodily form, employing that very sense of absence to evoke the melancholy and personal frailty that eventually engulfs all ambition and endeavor. Seidenberg's first series to feature monochrome renderings, this collection presents each image as a meditation on material culture and decay, while in aggregate foregrounding Seidenberg's characteristic exploration of negative space and compositional abstraction as a means to the recovery of the sublime.

132 pages, Hardcover

Published November 1, 2019