Those who are familiar with HASHI’s (Yasuomi Hashimura) work may find themselves bewildered by the introduction of his photographic series known as HASHIGRAPHY—a series created over twenty years by the American-based photographer. After all, HASHI is best known for his still life works taken with a high-speed strobe capturing the momentary forms of changi ng things at a 100,000th of a second. With its antique imagery embossed in subtle tones upon photographic paper faded to a sepia tinge, HASHIGRAPHY appears to be the work of a completely different artist.

Nonetheless, just as entirely contrary emotions can well up within a single person, there are times when a photographer need not adhere to a single style. In HASHI’s case, he has consistently sought to confront through his photography the question of what is time. By “stopping time” in his still lifes, he crystallizes one response. For in doing so, he brings into existence miraculous forms that wildly transcend our imagination.

There is another dimension to time as well, namely, its ceaseless flow. All things shift and transform as they are borne onward by the passage of time. For anyone from Japan, this idea recalls to mind the opening passage of Hojoki by Kamo no Chomei. “Ceaselessly the river flows, and yet the water is never the same.” Understanding time in its flowing and transformative aspects must have been a near instinctive thought for HASHI, a Japanese native.

In order to encapsulate shifting time in his works, HASHI conceived of the idea of treating the photographic paper itself as a kind of thing. Ordinarily, we are seldomly conscious of the materiality of photographic paper. As a screen upon which an image is projected, we deem it has served its purpose if we can grasp the meaning of the image there. However, if you think about it, it is a material that is constructed from a paper base, silver salts, and photographic emulsion, which itself deteriorates over the passage of time. For instance, we often observe in photographic paper printed in the nineteenth century that the images fade to a sepia tinge and that silver particles rise to the surface yielding a mysterious luster.

HASHIGRAPHY’s methods of presentation—paper edges ripped into jagged contours, a cloth-like textured foundation, and visible brush strokes left in the hand-applied photographic emulsion—serve to invoke in the eyes of the viewer the materiality of the photographic paper. Undoubtedly, even images printed on ordinary photographic paper will undergo a natural aging process with the passage of one hundred years or so. However, HASHI, an “impatient artist” by his own admission, was possessed by the yearning to see the end of time’s shifting flow in the present. He calls these works “visual mementoes of our age” as if seen from a future a thousand years hence.

HASHI has embedded one additional device in his HASHIGRAPHY series. They mostly portray photographic subjects that strongly evoke the past, such as Roman-era ruins or old-fashioned Paris streets. In essence, past, present and future are blended within the frame of HASHIGRAPHY, and fermented until they release the sweet bouquet of a vintage wine and generate images of profound flavor.

And so, what will really become of HASHIGRAPHY one thousand years hence? It’s amusing to imagine the people of the future excavating the ruins of those cities once known as “New York” and “Tokyo” and unearthing this battered bundle of photographic paper. As they gaze at those photographs, what will go through their minds? Will these images of lost scenes make them cry, make them smile, or just bewilder them? If only I could board a time machine to see for myself.