I chose this photographer for a number of reasons which I will describe here. Not only did he win this award for days after I was born, but his pictures usually depicted humans and nature. When he took photos of humans, they were almost always doing something: working, harvesting, or whatnot.
I like these photographs because there is a sense of simplicity about them that makes me think about how unnecessarily complicated our lives are these days. Everyone's got to work for 40-50 hours a week, everyone's got to make the deadlines and pay bills. But with Hamaya's shots, there is no notion of time. There is no feeling of overbearing responsibility or stress. It is simply an interesting shot of something exotic, far away from this world and impossible to
experience outside of the four sides of the photograph.
There's also a feeling of 'wetness' that I sense when I look at his photos, as if the sun took a day off and left everything in a cold fog. The camera's presence is not felt, neither is my curiosity for what is on the other side of the lens. I'm simply content with the subject on the film.
The harvesting photo's URL is here.
This chicken photo's URL is here.
Hiroshi Hamaya focuses on the forgotten Japan; as a wildlife conservationist might take photos of endangered animals, Hamaya's focus is on the overlooked and vanishing areas where other countries' influences are erasing what was once prevalent. His style is successful, but it's almost frustratingly silent in its message, if each of his photographs contain a hidden meaning.
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