The first issue of Medeia 2.0, a publishing project that focuses on underexplored ideas and emotions, presents a series by Japanese photographer Mikiko Hara.
In strangely thoughtful yet light photographs of everyday life, captured as if directly through the eyes of the artist, Hara shows a world of ordinary scenes and objects: people eating at a table, light streaming into a subway tunnel, a receding wave on the beach, a bowl of cut fruit or vegetables, flowers growing on the pavement. Unremarkable moments that, taken together, make up the texture of life, but weighed down by a sense of heaviness or foreboding. Then, when the series ends and Hara's epilogue begins, the images suddenly take on a new layer of meaning.
 
“After that, every time we went to the hospital, he would look for cherry tree branches, pick them up and bring them home. Soon he was picking them up when we went for walks in the park in our neighbourhood […]
When I asked my husband why he was picking them up, he said he would tell me one day.”
― from Mikiko Hara’s afterword