海：すべてのものをつなぐ水
Ocean: water that connects all things
Ocean: water that connects all things
The Ise-Shima Peninsula is located in the south-eastern part of Mie Prefecture, along the central-southern coast of the island of Honshū, the central axis of the Japanese archipelago. Many ama still live here today, a term composed of the kanji (Japanese ideograms) for “woman” and “sea”: breath-hold divers who practice underwater fishing with minimal use of modern technologies.
Between April and May 2025, field research was conducted in Ise-Shima, adopting a multidisciplinary approach that intertwines photography and ethnography, in collaboration with the anthropologist Bianca Carlino.
Even a brief study of the ama community is enough to understand how their relationship with the non-human world can offer a form of valuable wisdom, capable of helping us rethink the way we interact with the marine ecosystem.
The photographic objective of the research was to gain a deep understanding of the everyday life of these divers and their bond with the ocean, in an attempt to outline the ontology of a community that lives in continuity with the non-human world, giving it visual form.
Here, the sea is perceived as a living whole: a friend that offers sustenance and that, necessarily, must be cared for.
This is something that can undoubtedly be learned from the close study of responsible communities—those who stand as the first sentinels of climate change.
