There is a word in Japanese that George Nobechi has built a body of work around. Nukumori is the warmth a person leaves behind in a place after they have gone: the chair, the cup, the seat on the train. It is not a photograph of absence so much as a photograph of the few minutes before absence sets in, and Nobechi has been chasing it across two continents for a decade.
Biography
Nobechi was born in 1980 and raised between Japan and Canada, which is the fact underneath everything else. He spent twelve years in finance in Tokyo and New York before walking away from it, an encounter with the Photoville festival in 2014 having convinced him that the other life was the real one. He studied with Sam Abell at the Santa Fe Workshops. His series Here. Still. occupied him from 2015 to 2025 and took a Photolucida Critical Mass Top 50 award in 2017. His work is held by the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona. He now lives in Karuizawa, in Nagano.
In the collection’s words
“Nothing in the series is staged, everything is just as I found it in real life.”
That sentence is the whole argument. The two Nobechi photographs we know best are Rainy Spring Day on the Sea of Japan, Noto Peninsula (2015) and Visitor Center, Great Sand Dunes National Park, Colorado (2016), and a visitor who did not know better would not guess they were made by the same person on opposite sides of the Pacific. A man who grew up between two countries is unusually good at photographing the feeling of being briefly in neither.
Continue exploring
- Kim Richardson, who works the same long, quiet end of photography
- Laura Gilpin and Elliott McDowell, two generations of the New Mexico photographic line
- Photographs in the collection
- All exhibitions at Webster Collection
- The New Mexico Museum of Art
