Photographer is preserving Kyoto's past -- and, urgently, his own

Kai Fusayoshi captured city's soul on film, only to see much of his precious archive go up in flames

The Japanese photographer Kai Fusayoshi at Kyoto's Galerie Miyawaki on the occasion of his mini-retrospective exhibition there in October 2022. (Photo by Edward M. Gomez)

EDWARD M. GOMEZ, Contributing writer

March 8, 2023 08:00 JST

KYOTO, Japan -- Somewhere between the pull of nostalgia and the call of posterity, documentary photographers ply their trade, capturing for the ages what are often candid, unstaged moments of everyday life whose full resonance may sometimes only be revealed long after they have been preserved on film -- or, nowadays, on digital memory cards.