青幻舎 SEIGENSHA Art Publishing

Intrigued by the nomadic way of life, photographer Yu Yamauchi set out on his five-year travels through Mongolia and China’s Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region hoping to seek out scenes of human coexistence with nature. By the end of his journey, though, he found he had come by four groups of works—visions of countless stars raining their light from tens of thousands of light-years away on a land evoking the time of Earth’s creation; images of a paradise where animals dwell beside nomads who carry out their lives in harmony with nature, as they have always done; snapshots of a modern city regulated by economic activity; and scenes, encountered near the conclusion of his trip, of a desert seemingly right out of a work of near-futuristic science fiction.

Listed in this fashion, these four “worlds” might seem to almost track through time over the entire story of humanity from the distant past into the future. But in reality, all four exist side by side right in Mongolia—four very different spheres each living a very different but parallel “here and now.”

In his afterword, Yamauchi characterizes “our existence, here and now,” as “an accumulation” of the “choices” that we make from moment to moment. The images he presents invite us to examine the nature of this “here and now”—to see how it is shaped in all different places and by all different individuals each making their own choices and each going about existence in their own way.

In Dawn, Yamauchi shot sunrises from Mount Fuji, rendering images that traversed the Earth and the cosmos to conjure at an absolute world; in Jinen, he ventured into the forests of Yakushima, delving into his own internality in order to explore the relativity of human-nature ties. Here in Planet, he reveals an understanding of time and space as an aggregate of myriad parallel individual consciousnesses and worlds, leading readers beyond time and space on a multidimensional journey.

This new edition of Planet has been revised by the author based on his experiences since the original book was published in 2020. The layout of the pages on nomadic peoples has been adjusted to allow for larger photos, and new works added to the sequence; the series of modern city snapshots has been entirely reworked. Two fold-out spreads have been added to the desert section, and the book itself resized, though with the cover design kept the same.

Photographer Yu Yamauchi, born in 1977 in Hyogo Prefecture, spends long periods living amid nature in an effort to explore the relationships between it and humans and uncover the fundamental workings of the world. He trained himself in photography and worked as a studio assistant before embarking on a full-fledged artistic career. He has published three collections—Dawn (Akaaka, 2010), Planet (Seigensha, 2020), and Jinen (Seigensha, 2023)—as well as a book, Kumo no ue ni sumu hito (The Man Who Dwells above the Clouds; Sayzansha, 2014), about the owner of the lodge that he stayed in while photographing Dawn. Based in Nagano Prefecture, he holds exhibitions in Japan and around the world.