Decades No.2 CONTEMPORAL JOURNAL 2021-22



This magazine, Decades, was launched in 2020 in an attempt to weave together photographs about the perception/illusion of the transformation of experiential time due to rapid changes in social norms under restrictions and lockdowns.

I actually can no longer recall very well the summer of 2020 when we be- gan working for the magazine. What kind of future portends today when various infection-related restrictions are lifted, and days of tension over distance from others are coming to an end? And how will we remember today in the months, years, or decades to come as a memory before whatever happens next?


For the second issue of the photography magazine Decades, we asked ten photographers and ten writers, each around the same age, to contribute essays about their photographs/ events from 2021-22.

These happened in Fukushima, Tokyo, Beijing, Hangzhou, Seoul, Siem Reap, Phnom Penh, Ishinomaki, Warsaw, Ukraine, Czech Republic, Moldova, California, and Kochi in 2021-22.


── Ai Iwane




But any journals or photobooks published as "Covid-19 pandemic related" were mostly all from around the first declaration of the state of emergency in the spring of 2020. There is almost nothing after that. What I want to know is what happened after that. That is, the sequences of "now" still ongoing. But there are very few clues.［...］
In June 2022, I am trying to write about the "now" that continues after the beginning, about the time that piles up and crushes, and the time that sustains.

Extracted from p30 - p34 Tomoka Shibasaki



In an age when various disasters are increasing globally, and we cannot live without thinking how to live as our own problems and tackle them positively, Ai Iwane's desperate defense produced the body of work, Decades. Now we are part of that second volume, trying to find methods to reduce back the world we share.

Extracted from p136 RongRong&inri


The day I read the results of an experiment that showed eye contact for more than five seconds wakes consciousness and makes the sensory experience much longer, I met a high school student from Fukushima who said she was four years old twelve years ago.
She told me all she can recall now are fragmented memories--the big quake, her mother's hand holding her in a supermarket where merchan- dise had fallen over, the ceiling of the evacuation shelter, and such.
My friend, who will soon turn 80 years old, recognizes a year ago as yesterday. To him, all recent events are remembered as "15 years ago," and anything before is "40 years ago," and his memories from adulthood onward generally fall into those two categories.
What would happen if the 16-year-old and 80-year-old looked into each other, each living their 1/80th and 1/16th lifetime experience, or how had the last three years--when it seemed we were only getting closer to our own shadows--occur simultaneously?