The day you were born, I wasn’t born yet by Kai Yokoyama

This is what I have to do now with my life. When this pandemic began in 2020, I lost control like people around the world. I talked with my parents more than ever and shared almost all my time with them.
My mother's family photo. She says, "This uncle did a lot of bad things in the Pacific War." My grandfather is not in this picture.

This is what I have to do now with my life. When this pandemic began in 2020, I lost control like people around the world. I talked with my parents more than ever and shared almost all my time with them.

I searched for photos of my family in the past. I walked where my late grandparents lived and kept taking pictures. Then I tried to connect the present and the past. It was a kind of spatiotemporal movement as if I went back to where my soul had been. There were memories full of love and sadness.

This April, my father said, “This year’s cherry blossoms don’t look beautiful at all.” I couldn’t help feeling the death from the scattered cherry blossoms. Cherry blossoms are drawn on the fighters, and the military song says,

“Since we are flowers, we are doomed to fall. Let us fall magnificently for the country.”

My grandfather went to the Pacific War. He came back and gave birth to the daughter who gave birth to me. I think it’s a miracle. There are countless reasons why I wasn’t born here.

The lights of the building across the street from my apartment building. I took this picture on the first day of isolation due to the pandemic. I didn’t know why I took this picture at the time.

My grandparents had an arranged marriage in 1935.

My grandfather became deaf after he came back from the Pacific War.

Little is known about where my grandfather was and what he did during the war in 1944-1945. He didn’t tell his family anything about it.

When my mother asked her father about the war, he was always angry and said, “Don’t ask me that.”

My mother’s family photo. She says, “This uncle did a lot of bad things in the Pacific War.” My grandfather is not in this picture.

I live in the downtown area on the east side of Tokyo where my grandparents and parents lived.

The place where I live was destroyed by the Tokyo air raid 75 years ago.

My paternal grandfather was too short to go to war.

My mother doesn’t go out because of this pandemic, but she wears a kimono at home. This is a momento of her late mother.

I was born at dawn. The day was a month earlier than my scheduled date.

I was separated from my parents for a little while in the neonatal intensive care unit, wearing this name tag with my mother’s name on my ankle.

My mother is the first daughter her father had after he returned from the Pacific War.

One of my aunts died when she was a child and the other aunt committed suicide when I was little.

My grandmother passed away on the last day when the soul of my grandfather, who died 49 days ago, is said to remain in this world.

My grandfather came back from the Pacific War and stayed here for a few weeks for medical treatment.

My mother’s hand holding a picture of my grandfather. My relatives always say that I look like my grandfather. But it always gave me the fear that one day I might go deaf too.

As I continued to make this work, I knew that I could find out about my grandfather’s war history by applying to the Tokyo Metropolitan Government office, so I tried to do that. He had trained near where I grew up and where my mother worked. It was a fact we didn’t know at all.

A picture of my parents when they were young.

The current of the flowing river never ceases, yet the waters never remain the same.

When I began to make this work, there was one other phrase that has stayed with me for a long time, in addition to my father’s words. That is the opening line of the old Book of “Hojoki by Kamo no Chomei”.

“The current of the flowing river never ceases, yet the waters never remain the same. In places where the current pools, bubbles form on the surface, burst and vanish while others form in their place, never for a moment still. People in the world and their dwellings are the same.”

It made me realize that I have to accept this life and flow through it like a river. This is something that is connected to my grandparents and ancestors, and I realized that they also flowed through the river. A photograph becomes the past when it is taken. Isn’t photography a means of finding a connection with the past and the dead? I think so now. [Official Website]

More Stories

Definitive Ambiguities by Jack Savage

Definitive Ambiguities by Jack Savage

As the contemporary photographic world moves as if in fast forward, this photographic series by London-based Jack Savage is committed to the power of memory and its often haunted shadows.
Shadows of silence by Basim Ghomorlou

Shadows of silence by Basim Ghomorlou

I depict the aesthetics of nature in black and white to deliver certain universal feelings.Feelings that a photograph in color washes out. Feelings that every human is able to translate from visual poetry to an introspective understanding of the world that surrounds us
Art market by Dasha

Art market by Dasha

In every human action lies a certain pattern. We unconsciously do many things in our lives. Many people know by the example of the layout of goods in a supermarket.
https://www.dodho.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/bannerpr.jpg

We invite you to participate in the first edition of the Portrait Photography Awards. Our call is open to any artistic interpretation of portrait photography.

https://www.dodho.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/BAnImage.jpg

ImageRights provides intelligent image search and copyright enforcement services to photo agencies and professional photographers worldwide.

https://www.dodho.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/mono2022.jpg

The best 100 images along with the winning images published in the yearly book “Monochromatic – Best Photographers of 2022”

https://www.dodho.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/banner24.jpg

Call For Entries #24 | After 23 editions and more than 100 published photographers, our print edition has proven to be a simply effective promotional channel.

Omri Shomer ; Street photographer

Omri Shomer ; Street photographer

Omri Shomer is a street photographer, 34 years old, based in israel. He recently married to Tamar, and a father of Noam,his daughter. He started to take photographs at age 13, both stills and video.
Federico Duenas ; Visual resources

Federico Duenas ; Visual resources

Sight is a continuous stream of visual resources that allow us to understand and interact with the world, but memory is selective and interrupted. Coming from a Cinema background I tend to consider images for what they mean during a temporal dimension, and time makes them ephemeral.
Paul Eis ; The architecture photographer

Paul Eis ; The architecture photographer

In Paul Eis' Instagram project, he gathers images of buildings from mainly Berlin, Hamburg and some other cities, which are cut of their original context and reworked with bright colors.
Waiting Girls by Sadegh Souri

Waiting Girls by Sadegh Souri

In Iran, death penalty is given to the children for the crimes such as murder, drug trafficking, and armed robbery. According to the Islamic Penal Law, the age when girls are held accountable for their crimes is 9 years old, while the international conventions have banned the death penalty for individuals under 18.
Photography like onion by Silvia Georgieva

Photography like onion by Silvia Georgieva

he moment that changed my perceptions of the world and opened my senses to the surrounding realm was the moment of giving birth to my daughter in 2009.
Baltic Sea; Coastline by Tomasz Lazar

Baltic Sea; Coastline by Tomasz Lazar

Polish coastline has a length of about 500 km. On it there are several sandy beaches, cliffs, fishing villages and bathing. One of the most interesting places are Kaszuby.
Awoulaba/taille fine by Joana Choumali

Awoulaba/taille fine by Joana Choumali

I also note that most mannequins are manufactured locally, and I spot several places of handcrafted mannequins, by the road. I want to understand why. Why are locally made mannequins in white ? in an african country as Ivory Coast?
Walk like a Calcuttan by Anirban Mandal

Walk like a Calcuttan by Anirban Mandal

Calcutta (new name Kolkata) is a great city of India since late 17th century, enriched with history ,culture ,infrastructure  and cosmopolitan environment.
A.L.M.A by Mar Martin

A.L.M.A by Mar Martin

In the end of 2013, a high resolution image of the coldest place we know in the Universe was captured by the most powerful set of telescopes in the world: Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in the Atacama Desert.
Anatomy of a Photograph by Patrizia Piga

Anatomy of a Photograph by Patrizia Piga

I used a still-life table, a Fatif studio stand with an Hasselblad 500CM on it, and a Leaf Mamiya digital back. Hasselblad 120 macro lens. The light came from Profoto Strobo Flashes. The image was edited with Photoshop CS6
Noir Stills by Dan Bannino

Noir Stills by Dan Bannino

Noir Stills is a work inspired by 1940s-60s great noir movies' directors (especially Carol Reed and Alfred Hitchcock); I am an avid crime stories' reader and I wanted to create a series that could be an homage to this word.
Dreams and emotions by Marian Uhrin

Dreams and emotions by Marian Uhrin

My name is Marian Uhrin, born in 1984 in slovakian city called Kosice, At the age of 20 I decided to leave home and went to Prague, where I ´ve been living till present.
Survival by Taylor Pool

Survival by Taylor Pool

What does it mean to survive, and what are we surviving from? With all people, in all different walks of life, we are survivors. Some are survivors from wars past and present, others from devastation, hardships, miseries, and misfortune; either physical, emotional, or mental.
Mod UK by Owen Harvey

Mod UK by Owen Harvey

This photographic project is a celebration of the current UK Mod scene. Mod is a subculture that began in the late 50’s and through the years, it has seen many variations to its original style.
Ortega’s Nicaragua by Emanuele Giovagnoli

Ortega’s Nicaragua by Emanuele Giovagnoli

January 2017 marked the beginning of the 3rd consecutive term as President of Nicaragua of Daniel Ortega, a former Sandinista rebel fighter who took part in the Sandinista Revolution in 1979
Kristina Shkileva; Na rayone (In the commuter town)

Kristina Shkileva; Na rayone (In the commuter town)

People used to return from the business center to a residential area to spend the night and go back to work. Therefore, the area is called the sleeping community.

Featured Stories

Descendants of Samurai Ryotaro Horiuchi

Descendants of Samurai Ryotaro Horiuchi

In the Soma region of Fukushima prefecture, there is a traditional Samurai festival called “Soma Nomaoi”, which is said to have continued for more than 1000 years.
The Girl Who Escaped and Other Stories by Joan Haseltine

The Girl Who Escaped and Other Stories by Joan Haseltine

Some years after losing my husband I decided to reinvent my life, so I purchased a small ranch in Montana and a camera, neither of which I knew how to operate. I began visiting small towns at night. A woman standing alone on the streets after dark with a camera naturally aroused suspicion and distrust in these old Montana towns.
Grabarka by Xavier Ferrer Chust

Grabarka by Xavier Ferrer Chust

This is the most important location of Orthodox worship in Poland. Every year Grabarka is visited by more than 10,000 pilgrims. The Holy Mount Grabarka is an important place for pilgrimages by Orthodox believers in Poland
Everyday life; Our summer stories by Kata Sedlak

Everyday life; Our summer stories by Kata Sedlak

The idea behind the photo series "Our summer stories" came to existence after my three-year break - the maternity leave.
Shadow Of White by Nicola Ducati

Shadow Of White by Nicola Ducati

A photographic project to discover the deep north and the people who have inhabited these hostile territories for millennia, once uncontaminated and which today face new challenges.
Streets of New York; Nod of recognition by Barbara Jane Levine

Streets of New York; Nod of recognition by Barbara Jane Levine

Nod of Recognition is a series of portraits and street scenes of strangers captured on the streets of New York.  I walk, observe, and photograph people, following the path of light as it moves around the city. 
Haenyeo; Grandma divers by Alain Schroeder

Haenyeo; Grandma divers by Alain Schroeder

South Korea, Jeju island, known for its characteristic basalt volcanic rock, sits off South Korea. It is the home of the renowned Haenyeo or women of the sea who free dive off the black shores of Jeju harvesting delicacies from the sea.
Havana by David Saxe

Havana by David Saxe

Havana is a city suspended in time, where life slowly drifts to a steady salsa beat. People are civil and friendly—they will argue baseball in the park, walk along the Malecon, make love, marry, and raise families
Portraits with Wet Plate Collodion by Paul Alsop & Luke White

Portraits with Wet Plate Collodion by Paul Alsop & Luke White

Wet Plate Collodion is a historic photographic process that was pioneered and used in the In the mid to late 1800's by an English photographer called Frederick Scott Archer.
Bill Gekas ; Fine art portrait photographer

Bill Gekas ; Fine art portrait photographer

Bill Gekas is a multi awarded and published photographer that was born and resides in Melbourne Australia.
Canary island; Captain Flint by Oliver Weber

Canary island; Captain Flint by Oliver Weber

Around me furnishings in the style of "Rustic German" dating from the 1970s. Hunting trophies, a skeleton, a treasure chest, swords and books. I am not alone. With me is Captain Flint.
Sacred destinations : Borobudur by Aga Szydlik

Sacred destinations : Borobudur by Aga Szydlik

As the first rays of light break through the thick mist covering the ground, slowly and gracefully, Borobudur temple comes into the view. I close my eyes, deeply breathing in scent of jungle and lyrical call of Adhan, calling faithful to a Morning Prayer.
Winner Volume 1 – Dalia Fichmann

Winner Volume 1 – Dalia Fichmann

I was allowed to accompany an avalanche dog team for a day up in the mountains in Melchsee Frutt, Switzerland. It was a great desire of the dog handlers, to have some action shots from there dogs. So I made a few snapshots of the dogs in action during the training.
I Never told Anyone by Bénédicte Vanderreydt

I Never told Anyone by Bénédicte Vanderreydt

These seven images represent the women in Bénédicte Vanderreydt’s family that have been oppressed and objectified by a male dominated society, at a time when personal honour was of great significance to men.
Growing in Darkness by Mário Macilau

Growing in Darkness by Mário Macilau

Mário Macilau is a photographer who works with “the ghosts of society” – socially isolated groups and subcultures – activating subjects and their stories though his psychologically sensitive yet loaded photographic lens.
South Sudan; Smoker women by Ana Maria Robles

South Sudan; Smoker women by Ana Maria Robles

These women smoke tobacco, an ancient custom that marks their ancestry, identity and tribal pride. Their attitude was strong. Fierce. They were active participants of every ceremony and the Leaders of the communities. 

Trending Stories

The elegance, power and grace of the horses by Pia Fabienke

The elegance, power and grace of the horses by Pia Fabienke

To me, horses are inspiring beings. You can learn a lot from them and in turn they teach you a lot about yourself. With my pictures, I did not just want to portray the elegance, power and grace of the horses, but inspire people to bring fresh air into their thinking.
Direction by Shenyi Wang

Direction by Shenyi Wang

Direction is a fine art photography project to display the high contrast of light and shadow. In this project, I am looking for the charm of light and shadow.
Indigenous communities; Jaguar by Camila Berrio

Indigenous communities; Jaguar by Camila Berrio

Getting into the jungle takes several days; understanding the rhythm of life of the indigenous communities that live there requires much more. During the months that I spent with them, I had the opportunity to contemplate how life is being woven by the skillful hands of indigenous women who, in each backpack and in each seam, express their sadness, joy, hope and frustration.
Covid 19; Pandemic by Annick Donkers

Covid 19; Pandemic by Annick Donkers

At the beginning of the quarantine in Mexico I felt terrified. I just had my birthday and we joked that it was the last party before the end of the world.
Discarded by Steve Geer

Discarded by Steve Geer

In Chicago, behind the shops and restaurants, there are service alleys. These narrow canyons are lined with dumpsters which are filled each day and emptied each night.
Warsaw Halla ; A short rollerblading

Warsaw Halla ; A short rollerblading

The film tells one day story about group of rollerbladers. They share a common passion - a sport that allows them to maintain a right level of adrenaline.
Tacloban: Two Months after Typhoon Yolanda – Roland Nagy

Tacloban: Two Months after Typhoon Yolanda – Roland Nagy

On Nov. 8, 2013, Typhoon Yolanda (International name: Typhoon Haiyan) hit the Philippines recorded as the most powerful tropical cyclone and deadliest typhoon.
Street photography and decisive moment by Fernando Torres

Street photography and decisive moment by Fernando Torres

My long-term photographic project is included in what we call Street Photography, so popular and with so many followers in the world that it is internationally known by this english language term. Street photography was born with the appearance of manageable cameras that allowed photography spontaneous in public places.
Documentary photography; Shelter by Aleksandra Lekovic

Documentary photography; Shelter by Aleksandra Lekovic

Photographs were taken during 2014-2015 in an asylum in Belgrade, Serbia. Residents belong to different age groups, corporal and mental competence. Common to all is that they were brought to the borders of existence, some of them are on the boundary between life and death
Irish Travellers by Jamie Johnson

Irish Travellers by Jamie Johnson

Growing Up Travelling The experience I had photographing the grit and beauty, that is the everyday life of a Irish Traveller child, is one that inspires me everyday.
Fiori Morti: The Beauty of Death by Rob Linsalata

Fiori Morti: The Beauty of Death by Rob Linsalata

There is beauty in death. Nature teaches us this. Just as Butterflies live for one dance before they part ways with one another and life, flowers grow more beautiful as they die.
The True Cost of Oil by Garth Lenz

The True Cost of Oil by Garth Lenz

These images are from my larger exhibit "The True Cost of Oil which explores the relationship between the world's largest energy project and the environment - both local and global - which it threatens.

Other Stories

stay in touch
Join our mailing list and we'll keep you up to date with all the latest stories, opportunities, calls and more.
We use Sendinblue as our marketing platform. By Clicking below to submit this form, you acknowledge that the information you provided will be transferred to Sendinblue for processing in accordance with their terms of use
We’d love to
Thank you for subscribing!
Submission
Dodho Magazine accepts submissions from emerging and professional photographers from around the world.
Their projects can be published among the best photographers and be viewed by the best professionals in the industry and thousands of photography enthusiasts. Dodho magazine reserves the right to accept or reject any submitted project. Due to the large number of presentations received daily and the need to treat them with the greatest respect and the time necessary for a correct interpretation our average response time is around 5/10 business days in the case of being accepted.
- Between 10/30 images of your best images, in case your project contains a greater number of images which are part of the same indivisible body of work will also be accepted. You must send the images in jpg format to 1200px and 72dpi and quality 9. (No borders or watermarks)
- A short biography along with your photograph. (It must be written in the third person)
- Title and full text of the project with a minimum length of 300 words. (Texts with lesser number of words will not be accepted)
This is the information you need to start preparing your project for its presentation
To send it, you must compress the folder in .ZIP format and use our Wetransfer channel specially dedicated to the reception of works. Links or projects in PDF format will not be accepted. All presentations are carefully reviewed based on their content and final quality of the project or portfolio. If your work is selected for publication in the online version, it will be communicated to you via email and subsequently it will be published.
Contact
How can we help? Got an idea or something you'd like share? Please use the adjacent form, or contact contact@dodho.com
Thank You. We will contact you as soon as possible.
Submission
Dodho Magazine accepts submissions from emerging and professional photographers from around the world.
Their projects can be published among the best photographers and be viewed by the best professionals in the industry and thousands of photography enthusiasts. Dodho magazine reserves the right to accept or reject any submitted project. Due to the large number of presentations received daily and the need to treat them with the greatest respect and the time necessary for a correct interpretation our average response time is around 5/10 business days in the case of being accepted. This is the information you need to start preparing your project for its presentation.
To send it, you must compress the folder in .ZIP format and use our Wetransfer channel specially dedicated to the reception of works. Links or projects in PDF format will not be accepted. All presentations are carefully reviewed based on their content and final quality of the project or portfolio. If your work is selected for publication in the online version, it will be communicated to you via email and subsequently it will be published.
Get in Touch
How can we help? Got an idea or something you'd like share? Please use the adjacent form, or contact contact@dodho.com
Thank You. We will contact you as soon as possible.