Kanazawa Vacancy : Tracing Space in Japan

The secondary cities of Japan face a loss of population to the ever-enlarging megacities of Tokyo and Osaka, scattering abandoned structures throughout domestic centers. In Kanazawa—the second-largest Japanese city (after Kyoto) to escape bombing during World War II—this abandonment achieves particularly dramatic emphasis. Neighborhoods made up of houses from radically disparate eras are pervaded by century old constructions deserted and impossible to restore, leaving little choice but demolition. And with no demographic need for new construction, these lots remain vacant, used as occasional parking lots, sometimes paved over, sometimes left to natural processes of overgrowth. In Kanazawa Vacancy, photographer Steven Seidenberg presents 75 black-and-white images of vacant domestic lots, employing the various tools of positional perspective to emphasize the span of the vestigial structures that once stood in their place. These images are unyieldingly commonplace, and equally claustrophobic. They do not introduce a sense of space or a feeling of openness, or even evoke the tragic disintegration of certain American industrial and urban vistas, but rather foreground a sense of the passage of time into a kind of inevitable, universal absence, a sense of the emptiness that undergirds the constructed landscapes of the enclave, wherever it occurs. Anthropologist and archaeologist Carolyn L. White presents an accompanying narrative for the volume that contextualizes the work historically and geographically as well as a series of maps generated during the fieldwork. As Seidenberg worked to photograph the spaces, she mapped the spaces and documented the project using methods of contemporary archaeology and historic preservation. The Kanazawa work is one of numerous collaborations between the artist and anthropologist.