In the lead-up to the announcement of the third Inoue Yasushi award, The Japan Foundation, Sydney will host an exhibition of the photographs taken by novelist and poet Inoue Yasushi nearly thirty years ago, celebrating Inoue’s achievements in his novels and poems based on the Silk Road. Thanks to the latest high scanning technology from Canon these archival photographs have been renewed into fresh life in the twenty-first century.

His photographs are grouped in this exhibition in six sections. Each section largely represents individual themes: (1) Ruins, History, Time; (2) People; (3) Dream; (4) Nomads; (5) Desert, River; and (6) Cities. Each section is accompanied by texts of Inoue’s prose poems and writings. Through the combination of photographs and texts, Inoue captures the essence of human life in relation to nature.