Roof Architecture of Japan

Yes, I know this sounds a bit weird. Images of Japanese roofs? Really? Looking through hundreds of images I took in Japan, I couldn't work out how to present them. Not by city or date: I wasn't interested in yet another Japan travelogue any more than you are.

Only after puzzling over a theme for this collection for some time did it strike me what the predominant subject was. Then it took a little while longer to accept that one way to understand what is particular about Japanese traditional architecture — and, in some respects, Japanese cultural history — is to pay attention to the roofs of Japanese buildings. They exhibit lightness; tradition; craft; altitude; privacy; hierarchy; proportion; drama; darkness; brilliance.

I certainly did not plan this approach when I took the photos. As usual my "plan" for photography is nothing more sophisticated than "collect some image assets and decide what to do with them later". I left the curation for six months later, in this case.

This is not the only thematic idea I came up with. There are many images I'd like to show you that don't fit in this collection. I'll have to work on other ideas to gather the remaining images together.

Please download the PDF (42MB) from my Dropbox. Once you have the PDF, please view it full-screen in a program such as the free Adobe Acrobat Reader to see the images as I intended.