For Yuki Minagawa, simple pleasures radiate beauty. The light. The breeze. The changing seasons. Shaped by memory, rediscovered and renewed, his homecoming Photo Diary feels like a warm embrace, only more comforting than the day he left. This is Niijima, Japan. This is home.
Photos: Yuki Minagawa.
Home feels different when you've been away long enough. Either things change entirely and you clutch at memory, or they stay the same, but not as you recall. Yuki challenges the subjectivity of memory by chronicling it with his camera, capturing both how it was seen and how it will be remembered.
I grew up on Niijima, a small island in Japan surrounded by mountains and the sea. The ocean was always there. The breeze carried the scent of salt. The landscape changed with the seasons. As a child, these things felt ordinary. As I grew older, I realised they were not ordinary at all—they were beautiful.
No matter how much our cities evolve, we live because nature exists around us. People living within nature. Maybe that is why I’m drawn to scenes of people within nature.
I find myself chasing moments that feel both familiar and new, layering them over memories from my childhood. As if searching for the same sense of comfort I once felt, I want to preserve people as they are—along with the light, the wind, the seasons, and the places they call home.
Whether I’m walking through the streets of Japan or wandering through a city in Vietnam, what I find myself noticing rarely changes: soft light resting on the skin, the scent of the ocean carried by the wind, people watching the sunset, small conversations, and the quiet beauty of everyday life.
No matter where we are, people look up at the same sky, feel the same light, and live while thinking of someone they care about. I hope to never lose the ability to see beauty for what it is. I believe beauty lives in simple things. Through photographs and words, I hope to leave behind small fragments of that beauty in someone’s heart.
View more Hung Supply Photo Diaries, here.
