Cherry Trees

The photographs in Cherry Trees were made in Japan in spring 2020. Spring is the time of 'hanami', the annual celebration of cherry blossom, a symbol of the transience and fragility of life. But in 2020, it also coincided with the very beginning of the Covid pandemic. Here, French photographer Alexandre Morvan documents the invisible threat of the virus to everyday life. As his work progressed, he began to see connections between the strangeness of the situation and the dystopian worlds of anime and Japanese TV series that he had watched as a youth. Anticipating major environmental and humanitarian crises, some of these turned out to be visionary. This book is a story about transmission - the transmission of a virus, but also about the transmission of lifeworlds from the fictions of the past to our current lived reality.