Untitled [Spray of Grass]

A patch of grass turns into an exploding firework, each blade a spark against the night sky. Trained in aerial photography, Hamaya Hiroshi worked as a freelance photographer in Tokyo until a 1939 assignment from the Japanese military took him to the rural northern coast. Regretting the government’s use of his photographs for war propaganda, Hamaya decided not to return to the capital and remained in the north to make pictures of its landscape, people, and their folk customs, which he portrayed as an idealized antithesis to the urban milita-rism of imperial Japan. He returned to Tokyo in 1960 to photograph protests against the renewal of the United States–Japan Security Treaty, which would authorize the United States’ continued military presence in East Asia.