“Volga Afer Volga” is a documentary work about time and space along the Volga River. Often called “Mother River” in Russia, the Volga has been a popular theme for anyone working on photography, journalism, poetry and painting in Russia. As a Japanese living in Russia, I too became a victim of this centuries-old great Russian mannerism; in deciding to photograph life along the Volga, I was repeating the path of thousands of my predecessors... However, for this project I chose a specific material as a reference – a National Geographic article, “Voyaging on the Volga amid War and Revolution,” written by an American, William T. Ellis, in 1917, the year of the Russian revolution. My trip along the Volga coincided with the war and revolution in Ukraine in 2014, partially echoing the state of Russia during the revolution and war of 1917. Of course, during that bloody year Russia was also embroiled in WWI, fighting against the Austro-Hungarians in what is now western Ukraine and against the Ottoman Empire in the Caucasus – a conflict which finds a contemporary echo in the recent deterioration of the relationship between Russia and Turkey. The theory that history repeats itself comes from just such fragments coinciding with past events, and in the course of my journey I explored not only the present situation of the Volga but also such déjà vu phenomena. The work is based, literally, on the Volga voyage of William T. Ellis (my photographs and texts are overlaid with Ellis’s originals, published in National Geographic in 1918); thus, I called the book “Volga After Volga,” an exploration of Ellis’s journey, foreigners’ views on Russia and the coincidences and gaps, in both time and space, along the Volga.