青幻舎 SEIGENSHA Art Publishing

Does the world revolve around us, or them? Is the time now ripe for a revival of the geocentrism vs. heliocentrism debate, recast in modern form?

Indonesia, India, Benin, Peru, Mongolia, Japan: the images here capture vast steppes, 5,000-meter peaks, expanses of scorched red-brown earth—lands utterly unlike anything most of us know from our daily lives—together with the people who dwell there in adherence to their own treasured values and traditions. When their eyes confront ours, we cannot but remember the series’ theme, “the center of the world,” and wonder: Where is this center, truly? Here, where we viewers stand now? Or there, among the people of the so-called margins of the globe? Their gazes, staring out at us from their photos, unsettle our notions of centrality and upend the way we see the world.

A sequel to Boundary (Seigensha, 2021), this volume presents the first new works in four years by a photographer who has journeyed to more than 140 countries and regions around the globe.

Uruma Takezawa was born in 1977 and worked as a staff photographer at a diving magazine before turning freelance in 2004. His major publications include Walkabout (Shogakukan, 2013), a photographic record of an epic 1,021-day journey through 103 countries; The Songlines (Shogakukan, 2015), a memoir of the same trip; and Boundary (Seigensha, 2021), featuring images of the land and people of Iceland. In 2015 he held a solo exhibition, Land, in New York to widespread media and public acclaim. He is the recipient of the 2014 Nikkei National Geographic Photo Prize Grand Prize.
　Takezawa travels across the world in pursuit of his lifelong theme of “the Earth,” which in his conception encompasses both the land and the people whose lives are intertwined with it. His art name, Uruma, means “coral island” in Okinawan and is an homage to the islands’ seas, which were his inspiration for taking up photography.