This exhibition presents works from Mika Ninagawa’s photo book PLANT A TREE, published in 2011. The book (a limited edition of 700, numbered) is designed and edited by Satoshi Machiguchi, who also designed Ninagawa’s noir (2010), and is known for 40＋1 PHOTOGRAPHERS PIN-UP (1995), which covers 40 photographers of his generation. Ninagawa usually gets involved in the editing process, but for the first time she left everything to Machiguchi.
In the series Ninagawa photographed cherry blossoms bloomed along Meguro river for only 3 hours one day in 2010. She captured flower petals falling, floating, and drifting away on the dark surface of the river. It gives a feeling of looking at them through tears, and wrings the viewer’s heart with the sense of fragility and conflict.