About YEARS

YEARS is the monthly photo book publishing project for the entire year.

The photo books include the photos taken each month over the past 10 years.

(ie: The January issue will include photos from January... and so on.)

　　Size/ A4(297*210mm), 62 pages, 61 photographs, Quality printed in Japan

　　Issued monthly for one year from January 2021

       (Shipping starts from this late December)

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Sometimes the things that we thought would never change suddenly change, don't they?

The pictures I present at YEARS are just ordinary scenes of cities that had been unbroken until the beginning of 2020, before COVID-19, but when I look at them now, feel like they were taken long ago.

My aim is to provide viewers with a group of photos that remind viewers of the importance of the present, because all the depression or fun times will come to an end at some point.

I believe that the images that the viewers get from each month's group of images are tied to their own memories of that month. In other words, I would like the viewers to look at the city seen by Tadashi Onishi, fixed-point camera in Tokyo, and feel the similarities and differences between their own experiences and those photographs, and to look at their own present.

About the Photographs

I take pictures of my surroundings as part of my life, just as I brush my teeth every day, so I take pictures of where I live, mostly in Tokyo (especially Shinjuku).

Even after I got sick a few years ago by a five-hour round trip commute to work everyday, I was constantly rocking on a crowded train to work with work, family, and the mortgage on my mind.

Every morning when I get off the train at Seibu-Shinjuku Station, in rush of passengers on the platform, I wake up from my drowsiness with the cold air that is typical of the morning. I walk silently through the city of morning light, my thoughts drifting back to yesterday's unfinished business, the scolding I gave my child this morning, my wife's frustration, and the fun weekend.

I am a part of the "Baby boomer generation" and "Japanese lost generation", and I have always been somewhat dissatisfied with society and the life I have lived. I think the photos of the city I take on my way to work reflect that feeling. Maybe that's why I've been neglecting those photos for so long, because I couldn't bring myself to look back at them.

But after the lockdown in Tokyo caused by the COVID-19 crisis, I started working mainly at home, which freed me up a bit of time and my mind, so I decided to face the photos I hadn't been able to look back on.

Now that the "New Normal" era, somehow the past scenes on the photographs makes me feel nostalgic for it even I used to hate so much.

To me, those are metaphors for my own attributes, such as in Tokyo, the long-distance commuting businessman, husband and father. But I think viewers can see something different by connecting with their own memories.

YEARS structure

Photographs turn the flow of time into a moment, and three-dimensional objects into two dimensions. The viewers subconsciously imagines the depth of the image and the time before and after the image based on his or her own personal experience. In other words, we believe that when we present a scene that everyone has seen before, we are able to recall a different story because of the differences in the experiences of the people who have seen it.

In the case of statistics, the more data, the more plausible the facts become. In photography, it can be called universality.

In order to increase the data, I decided to present as many photos as possible. In order to make the selection more universal, I divided the pages by month.

By doing so, I made it possible to enjoy seasonal events and incidents that occurred at the time, as well as changes in time over the years, in each issue.

Throughout the 12 issues of the magazine, viewers can feel the four seasons unique to Japan.

I hope the viewers will enjoy each story from the point of contact between the accumulation of these facts and the viewer's memory.

What led to the "YEARS" project?

I came up with the idea for the composition of YEARS while working on the "ROZOU project". ROZOU is a project to exhibit photos on the street with a projector.

Each time I will project about 1500 photos on a theme in about 1.5 hours until the batteries run out. Sometimes chronologically, sometimes randomly.

On August 2020, I projected stratified photos for each month, and it was interesting to see how the four seasons and memories beyond the years came into view and revealed a story, which led me to want to compile this into a book.

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