For the past ten years, Japanese photographer Yuki Shimizu has been photographed alongside rivers, ponds, lakes and other bodies of water. Water is the giver of life, both literally and metaphorically. Many of the places Shimizu has photographed have deep ties to folklore and local myths, serving as sites for mystical beings and fantastic stories. Listening closely to the history embedded in each landscape, Shimizu’s “Shore” uses photographs and lyrical texts to form a riveting, layered space and time somewhere between real and unreal, populated by stories and people who may or may not exist.

“You were stolen from under your feet and turned into a fish
Fish cannot forget anything and will spend a lifetime remembering a single day of spring
Meaningless details crowd your memory
You count them one by one
as I run up the cliff, I look back again and again
I said, ‘I’ll be back in the spring’”
― excerpt from Yuki Shimizu’s “Shore”