Nikon Df & Nikkor H85mm f1.8
青森ねぶた祭 | Aomori Nebuta Matsuri 2o23
These images were created at the heart of the Nebuta Matsuri held in Nakano in October 2023.
Aomori Nebuta Matsuri is a major festival in the Tōhoku region, designated as UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage.
It is an incredible parade of costumed dancers (haneto 跳人), taiko 太鼓 players and huge floats, shimmering in color and lit up at night.
As a sign of support for this region of northeastern Japan, which was devastated by the terrible earthquake of 2011, Nakano Town Hall in Tōkyō has been organizing its own festival since 2012 under the name “Nakano Festival to Support Tōhoku”, where Aomori’s Nebuta Matsuri takes place in October every year.
“It is a wave that you feel deep inside your body. The drums beating with all their power, the crowd in effervescence, the colorful dances, sometimes jerky and sometimes delicate, the flute tunes that pierce this orderly din, everything is so energetic that the senses are sucked into this whirlwind of fervor. In the midst of this bubbling, it seems as if this visual and sonic material is melting together.
Letting myself be carried along by the current of this lively crowd, I try to capture, with my camera, this exaltation, this bubbling mass of individuals gathered for this marvelous festival. Here and there, with long breaths from my shutter, I record faces, hands, colors, dancers, percussionists in action, and all this visual material accumulates in successive layers on my sensor, like those of a painter on his canvas, to restore all the density and depth of the scene.
These eighteen photographs are excerpts from the sixty that tell the poetic story of Aomori’s Nebuta Matsuri.“
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