A nameless road continues on for thousands of miles under thousands of different skies, wending its way through thousands of different landscapes. Along either side anonymous towns and cities flow by with regularity, like scenes in a photography album sorted by a methodical traveler.
It would take a very observant eye to detect, behind the low-key facade of Hiroshi Ono's sequential photography, the thousands of sorrowful memories that are a hidden but inherent part of each scene. "Line on the Earth," Ono's photo exhibition now showing at Shinjuku's Konica Plaza, is a silent memorial to the recurrent evils that plague our planet and its inhabitants: wars, dictatorships, massacres, assassinations, natural disasters and so on.
Contrary to what one might expect, it wasn't fervent anti-war feelings that inspired the young photographer to journey through troubled lands on five continents, recording what he saw along the way. After he won the Konica Photography Prize for promising young photographers last year, and a 5 million yen bonus prize to carry out his project, Ono left Japan and traveled through nearly 50 countries in a little over 12 months. Visiting places where war or natural calamities had left deep scars on the inhabitants, such as Azerbaijan, Armenia, Bosnia, Cambodia, Kosovo, Israel, Liberia, El Salvador, Haiti and, in Japan, Hiroshima and Okinawa, he took about 8,000 shots, 49 of which are on show at Konica Plaza.
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