青幻舎 SEIGENSHA Art Publishing

Throughout his extensive travels, photographer Uruma Takezawa has been a keen observer of boundaries, from international borders to the intangible forces that divide us—racism, religious conflict, political and territorial disputes.

This much-anticipated collection, Takezawa’s first in nearly five years, juxtaposes striking images of Icelandic nature with portraits of human life around the globe, and in the process probes our conceptions of the “boundaries” in our world.

Uruma Takezawa, born in 1977, studied law at Doshisha University in Kyoto. As an undergraduate he spent a year in the United States teaching himself photography while working part-time at a monochrome photo-processing lab. After returning to Japan, he cut his teeth as a staff photographer at a diving magazine, where he specialized in underwater photography. He began his career as an independent photographer in 2005. In 2010 he embarked on a 1,021-day journey through 103 countries, which he documented in the photobook Walkabout (2013) and its companion travelogue The Songlines (2015), both published by Shogakukan. In all, his travels have taken him to more than 140 countries and regions around the world. In 2014 he won the Grand Prize in the Third Nikkei National Geographic Photo Prize, and in 2015 his solo exhibition in New York received acclaim and widespread media attention.