Cuny JanssenYoshino

“Since that day, when I saw the blossoming treetops in the mountains of Yoshino, my heart left my body behind!,” writes the Japanese poet Saigyō in the 12th century. And indeed the flanks of the Yoshino mountains, planted with more than 30,000 cherry trees, must already at that time have offered the overwhelming sight that still makes them an eloquent testimony to that harmonious shaping of exuberant nature by human hand which is so characteristic of Japan. For more than 1,400 years, therefore, the temples, the mountain slopes and the river in Nara Prefecture have belonged to the Buddhist pilgrimage calendar during the cherry blossom season in spring; formerly it was the aristocracy who came, today Yoshino is a popular tourist attraction.
In 19 large landscape-format photographs Cuny Janssen has not only assembled enchanting and sensitive studies of nature from Yoshino, but has also included in her unusual photo book a small anthology of Japanese poetry compiled by Jos Vos, which the Dutch specialist in Japanese studies rounds off with his travel essay “A Fox in Yoshino.” Like scarcely any other contemporary photographer, Cuny Janssen knows how to design her books in keeping with their subject; in Yoshino she heightens the calm and contemplative mood of her photographs through a selection of austere poetry that strikes up a hymn of praise to this Japanese place of longing.