Aya Fujioka: Here Goes River

Aya Fujioka began photographing her hometown of Hiroshima after moving back from New York in the 2010s. She started without a clear purpose, and photography became a way of re-experiencing her hometown and coming to accept it again. It also became a record of the real faces and ordinary moments of a city living its everyday life decades after its historic tragedy. Here Goes River collects the snapshots Fujioka made there some seventy years after the atomic bombing. She avoids the familiar image of "Hiroshima" as a city burdened by history, yet her pictures inevitably point back to it: high school students dancing in front of the Atomic Bomb Dome, a girl in a red skirt stepping down toward the river, the stir in the streets when President Obama visited the city. They connect the present to history, and personal experience to collective memory. Winner of the 43rd Kimura Ihei Award (2018).

Published by AKAAKA in 2018
H252mm × W187mm
240 pages
Softcover with slipcase
ISBN: 978-4-86541-064-8

Aya Fujioka
Born in Hiroshima in 1972, Fujioka studied photography at Nihon University. She continued to photograph while traveling in Europe and Taiwan, and lived in New York from 2007 to 2013 with a grant from Japan's Agency for Cultural Affairs. After returning to her hometown, she began photographing Hiroshima, and in 2018 she received the 43rd Kimura Ihei Award for Here Goes River (AKAAKA Art Publishing), a photobook capturing present-day Hiroshima.

Fujioka now lives and works between Kyoto and Hiroshima, and continues to actively publish photobooks and exhibit internationally. Recent exhibitions include I'm So Happy You Are Here: Japanese Women Photographers from the 1950s to Now at the International Center of Photography, New York, and the Bunkamura Museum of Art, Tokyo (2026), and Countermeasures Against Awkward Discourses at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa. Her work is held in the collections of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, among others. Her publications include Life Studies and I Don't Sleep (both AKAAKA Art Publishing).