Hideaki Hamada

Have a look at the photography of Hideaki Hamada. Go on, go and have a look now, I’ll wait…

I’ve been following this dude on Flickr for a while now, and I ‘favourite’ nearly every photograph he uploads. If I was on Facebook I’d probably ‘like’ every single photo on his One Year website. (I’ve tried, but it didn’t work). I can’t publicly appreciate the images on this website, so I’m writing about them on mine.

I love Hideaki Hamada’s photographs. The combination of soft focus/short depth-of-field, the green-shift in processing, and simplicity of the image, all make me sort of reminisce of a fictional time where I visited Japan. I have actually been to Japan before, but Hamada’s images only partially remind me of my physically being there. I dunno. It’s hard to explain.

When I look at these photographs they make me feel contented. Not too happy, just contented — they tease a little smile out of me every time. They make me feel calm, even when there’s tremendous movement:

I’m sure these feelings are due to the compositions and muted colours. They are very consistent as a body of work (not that I look at them as a body of work in an art gallery sense). There is a confidence there; it makes we wonder how many images are taken which Hamada is not showing us. But it’s something I don’t need to know — I don’t want to know. Each image is another representation of a seemingly perfect and innocent life in my fictional time- and continent-travelling mind.

And then there are the children. The love, devotion, and perhaps envy of his children’s stages of life[1. I’m presuming these are his children…] is obvious in these photographs — the innocence and wonder of being a child. This feeling delicately reaches out and touches me.

If I ever have a family, I wish to produce images such as Hideaki Hamada’s.

Photo sites:
One Year →
Hare Tokidoki Haru →
Instagram →
Flickr →

Music:
Songbird →

(Photographs reproduced with permission.)