Gentaro Ishizuka: Gold Rush Alaska

(Hardback)

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'This body of work symbolizes how man's efforts to conquer nature only survive as an image of history in the best of Romantic traditions.' - Frits Gierstberg

This book is Gentaro Ishizuka's documentation of the melancholy remnants of Alaska's gold rush of the late nineteenth century. The discovery of gold in the Alaskan wilderness attracted hoards of fossickers and industrialists, each hoping to strike it rich. Yet the subsequent reality was that the rush was unprofitable for most except the lucky (and ruthless) few; in time most diggers moved on to pursue new dreams and nature remained violated by their efforts. Ishizuka's photos of rusted shovels and machinery, dilapidated log huts dwarfed by the landscape, and eerie interiors and still lifes show the ghosts of human activity and how nature is slowly reclaiming her territory.

Author Bio

Born in Tokyo in 1977, Gentaro Ishizuka photographs with an 8 x 10 or other large-format camera and has recently focused on polar landscapes with motifs such as glaciers, pipelines and traces of the gold rush. Ishizuka received the Photographic Society of Japan's Newcomer's Award in 2004, and a fellowship for overseas study from the Japanese Agency for Cultural Affairs in 2011. His book Pipeline Iceland / Alaska (2013) was honored with the Higashikawa New Photographer Award in 2014.