Artist talk: Hironori Kodama

Hironori Kodama started out as a director and news cameraman for the Japanese channels TV Asahi and NHK, filming documentaries and news stories about historic events.

In 2019 the Hong Kong protests caught his attention, and he photographed them for ten months. The result was two photo books: NEW CITY (2020) about the protests and BLOCK CITY (2021) about the barricades.

Later he stepped away from news journalism to look for deeper, more human stories. He immersed himself in local communities and began photographing young skaters in Kharkiv. These unexpected and strange experiences became a kind of personal ethnography for him.

Sometimes I laughed, and sometimes I felt an inner conflict. There was a lot of sadness during the war. I keep recording these inner doubts.

Kodama will talk about his career and his project on Kharkiv skateboarders. The talk is in English with simultaneous interpretation into Ukrainian.