Two children sit side by side on a seawall. Both have their backs turned, so we never see their faces. A bridge and factory chimneys blur in the distance. The photograph is by Hideaki Hamada (濱田英明), and the children are his two sons, Haru and Mina. They are someone else's kids, yet everyone who looks at the picture is reminded of some afternoon from their own childhood.
From Designer to Photographer
Hamada was born in 1977 on Awaji Island in Hyogo Prefecture. He worked as a designer before going freelance as a photographer in 2012, at thirty-five. That same year he published his first photobook, 《Haru and Mina》, in Taiwan. He now divides his time between Osaka and Kobe and takes on personal work, magazines, advertising, portraits, and even video direction.
《Haru and Mina》, Eleven Years at a Distance
Haru and Mina are Hamada's two sons. He photographed them from July 2009 to April 2020. The revised and expanded edition released in late 2025 selects 313 of the roughly 8,000 pictures he took over those years and fills 504 pages with them.
The boys in these pictures do not pose for the camera. They walk along the water, climb trees, sit on the seawall and look into the distance. The surroundings take up more of the frame than the children do: a lawn covered in fallen blossoms, concrete on a riverbank, an overcast sky. Many shots show them from behind or in profile. So before you read an expression, you feel the air of the place.
He did not shoot this way from the start. In an interview with SHIPS, Hamada said that he first photographed the boys up close, and that he found his way to more distant compositions after he began using a medium format film camera. Because he was with them every day, he said, he could afford to step back. He had no need to stand right next to them to show how close they were. Spending so much time together meant he could wait.
Taken one at a time, these could be ordinary family snapshots. Look at several years of them in sequence, though, and the boys grow taller, the distance between them shifts, and so does the gap between them and the person behind the camera. Hamada's photographs gain their strength not from any single frame but from many frames piling up.
《Family》, Where Bodies Face Instead of Faces
《Family, 2012–2017》 looks beyond the two boys to the family as a set of relationships. Few of these pictures show everyone standing and facing the camera. More often one person is looking at another, or people share a room while each spends the time in their own way.
Stepping back does not drain the feeling. It is only from a step back that the whole relationship comes into view. Hamada does not simply enlarge faces. He also takes in the direction a body is turned, the shape of the room, the empty space between one person and the next. In an interview with amana, he explained that physical distance from a subject carries over into psychological distance, and that keeping apart is what lets the viewer step into the picture.
《DISTANT DRUMS》, Places That Are Nowhere
《DISTANT DRUMS》, self-published in 2019, collects photographs taken from 2013 to 2018 in London, Paris, Egypt, Taipei, Hong Kong, Hanoi and elsewhere. The title comes from Haruki Murakami's travel book 《Distant Drums》.
Hamada's travel photographs contain almost no landmarks. Instead there are people crossing the street, men perched on motorbikes, a sandwich board outside a bookstore. Even in an unfamiliar country, someone is walking, waiting, working. Take away the city names and the pictures, though made in places far apart, run together like a single world. The same eye shows in the 2014 series 《India》 and 《USA》.
In Tokyo he works the other way around. 《Tokyo / Somewhere》, ongoing since 2014, began as a series in the free magazine 《Metropolitana》. In a city he knows well, he looks for places that have no name: a sidewalk where pigeons take off, an old man waiting at a crosswalk, light lingering on the corner of a building.
《Camera Talk》, Watching the Watcher
《Camera Talk》, ongoing since 2010, is a series of photographs of people holding cameras. On a sand dune, in the middle of a stream, on a park lawn, someone raises a camera toward us. Hamada attached a short note to the series, saying that you and the person looking at you live in the same time.
The series lays bare how Hamada thinks about photography. A photograph keeps the time of the person who looked as well as the person who was seen. The one taking the picture and the one in it share the same moment. Seen this way, 《Haru and Mina》 is a father's record of his children, and also a record of one person looking at another for a very long time.
The Limit of Ten Frames
Hamada's preferred gear is documented in his own interviews and posts. In a 2011 interview with Lomography, he named the things he always kept in his bag: a Pentax 67II, SMC Takumar 6×7 105mm F2.4 and 90mm F2.8 lenses, and Kodak Portra 400. In a February 2019 post on X, he again listed his usual combination as the Pentax 67 with the 105mm F2.4 and Portra 400. He said he left developing and scanning to Yamamoto Camera (山本写真機店) and did his own adjustments in Lightroom and Photoshop when needed.
In the same 2011 interview, he noted that a roll of medium format film gives you ten frames. That, he said, makes you check every corner of the frame and spend your shutter presses sparingly. Isn't his habit of stepping back and waiting, rather than chasing the boys and firing off frame after frame, closely tied to that limit?
Still, it would be hard to file Hamada away as a film-only photographer. A November 2022 post lists, side by side, a Pentax 67II as his main film camera, a Mamiya 645 AFD II as his backup film camera, and a Fujifilm GFX 100S as his main digital camera. In a 2018 interview with 《COMMERCIAL PHOTO》, he said he matches the tones when he posts pictures shot on an iPhone, a digital camera and film to a single gallery. His color does not come from one film stock. It comes from his own eye pulling together work made with different tools.
The Same Distance on a Film Set
Recently Hamada's name has also appeared on Kore-eda Hirokazu's live-action film “Look Back.” He spent about three months on set shooting stills. Working from positions apart from the main camera, he captured moments that never appear in the film, along with the objects around them. If the time the two leads spend together feels like a viewer's own memory, it is likely because the same distance and patience carried over from 《Haru and Mina》. We cover the film and its film stock separately in our “Look Back” article.
About the Artist
- Name Hideaki Hamada (濱田英明)
- Born 1977, Awaji Island, Hyogo Prefecture, Japan
- Major works 《Haru and Mina》(2012; revised and expanded edition 2025), 《DISTANT DRUMS》(2019), 《Family》, 《Tokyo / Somewhere》, 《Camera Talk》
His full body of work is on the artist's website.
