To commemorate the 200th anniversary of Henry David Thoreau’s birth in 2017, Koichiro Kurita’s work from the project Beyond Spheres will be exhibited in the Main Gallery of the Griffin Museum of Photography, Winchester, MA from April 6 through May 28, 2017. In response to Thoreau’s writings and overriding philosophy regarding timeless man’s relationship with nature, these photographs are an answer to the question “What if Thoreau had been a photographer?” 

Koichiro Kurita launched the Beyond Spheres project in 2010. The aim of this project was, and is, to give pictorial form to Thoreau’s ideas and writings by employing the existing photographic methods in Thoreau’s time and invented by his contemporary, photography pioneer William Henry Fox Talbot. In homage to Thoreau and Talbot, Kurita has created handmade photographs with the same depth of thought and reflection on man’s coexistence with nature in this project. This approach provides a unique opportunity to experience Thoreau’s philosophy of man’s relationship to nature in visual form and to demonstrate the value of photography made by hand in today’s fast-paced world.

Mr. Kurita received an ACC fellowship in 1990 for creative work in photography in the U.S.