青幻舎 SEIGENSHA Art Publishing

For me, the images of my customers are not the sad images that await my future self. In fact, it was me who received the energy from the bento deliveries.

——Fukushima Atsushi

In his early twenties, Fukushima Atsushi suddenly found himself in a job that brought him into regular contact with solitary senior citizens. At first he could not bear to see how they lived, and so kept his distance—but then, gradually, established relationships and even became friends with them as he took pictures of them inside their homes. This series that moved viewers at the 2020 Kyotographie International Photography Festival is the decade-long record of one young man grappling with what it means to turn his camera on others as he grows into becoming a photographer in the real sense of the word.

Fukushima Atsushi was born in 1981 in Kanagawa Prefecture and graduated in photography from the Osaka University of Arts in 2004. From 2004 to 2014 he photographed the clients of the senior-citizen meal service at which he worked part-time in the city of Kawasaki. The series, Bento Is Ready (the basis for this book), received the KG+ Award Grand Prix in 2019 and was shown at the Kyotographie International Photography Festival in the following year.