Since moving to Recent York, Japanese-born photographer Fumi Nagasaka has spent the last 20 years exploring the US together with her camera. But it surely wasn’t until 2017 that she visited the agricultural or southern states when a friend Tanya invited her on a visit to her hometown of Dora, Alabama. 

With a population of around 2,300, Dora is a real small town. “Church, college football, and regional fast food chain Jack’s are popular with locals,” writes Nagasaka. “Tanya’s family introduced me to every of those during my first visit – an initiation of sorts.” 

Despite its modest scale, something in regards to the place deeply moved Nagasaka. “My first trip was full of emotion,” she recalls. “I witnessed kindness, pain, and humour, but most of all beauty. Beauty looked as if it would radiate from the landscapes and the people I met.” Over the next seven years, she returned persistently, taking portraits of the town and the locals and creating an archive of images which are without delay poignant and cinematic. 

Lauded for her documentary-style portraits chronicling American youth culture, Nagasaka now plans to present this series in a recent book Dora, Yerkwood, Walker County, Alabama (published by Gost Books) with the assistance of Kickstarter. The campaign offers its backers the prospect to pre-order copies of the book alongside prints of chosen images from amongst its beautifully-bound pages. 

“Dora, Yerkwood, Walker County, Alabama is a photographic record of the incredible experiences I had during my time spent in Walker County,” she writes in a press release accompanying the book. “The areas I visited and the individuals I met were unforgettable and hopefully the pictures on this book show the uninitiated a view of this region as seen by an impartial outsider who got here to view the world as one other home.”

Visit the gallery above for a more in-depth look and find details about Nagasaka’s Kickster for Dora, Yerkwood, Walker County, Alabama here.

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