Every summer, the forests of Japan’s Yamagata prefecture come alive with the dreamlike, warm lights of thousands of fireflies. Photographer Kazuaki Koseki has set out to capture this charming phenomenon with his camera. The breathtaking images make up his Summer Faeries series, a collection of images that seem out of a storybook.
“For my series Summer Faeries, I explore the relationship between the ecology and natural environment of Himebotaru (Luciola parvula) flying in the summer night forest,” Koseki tells My Modern Met. “The spectacle of fireflies, an endemic species of Japan, flying through the summer forest is like a scene where the stars in the sky repeat twinkling. That sight is fantastic enough to forget the awe of the night forest.”
Born into a family that owned a photo studio, Koseki's fascination with these creatures also dates back to his childhood. “I used to go to the paddy fields near my home with my family to watch and enjoy genji botaru (fireflies), catching them as we went,” he recalls. While Koseki had been traveling around to photograph them, he was delighted to learn they were also found in the Yamagata prefecture, where he lives, allowing him to venture into the forests at night to see the fireflies' glow.
Koseki explains that the forest-dwelling creatures he photographs are adult males that emit light and fly around the forest in order to pass on the light to the next generation. (Females' degenerated wings keep them from flying).
“The period is short, lasting from one week to 10 days in early summer, and the beauty of life is felt in the fragility and preciousness of life that can be sensed from the twinkling of light,” the photographer says. “I take photographs while trying to predict the light trails of the twinkling lights, and the resulting images are always full of surprises and unpredictability, as no two light trails are the same every time I photograph, which is one of the reasons why they continue to fascinate me.”
For Koseki, the biggest challenge is the limited seasonal duration of the forest glow in early summer, as well as the low intensity of light at night, which he says tend make the light changes monotonous. “At night, when there is not even moonlight, filming takes place in darkness, which is invisible to the naked eye,” he says. To protect the fireflies, no deliberate artificial lighting is used.
The photographer hopes his images raise aware of the plight of the local fireflies. “They have lived in uninhabited, deep forests for a long time,” Koseki says. “Especially in the last 100 years or so of modernization, a lot of these forests have been cut down for various reasons, leaving no place for them to live unaffected by human activity. They live under constant threat of our modern times. It is my hope to remind everyone that we have many neighbors living around us all the time, all coexisting together on this planet called Earth.”
Photographer Kazuaki Koseki has set out to capture the charming glow of the fireflies that call Japan’s Yamagata prefecture home.
“For my series Summer Faeries, I explore the relationship between the ecology and natural environment of Himebotaru (Luciola parvula) flying in the summer night forest,” he tells My Modern Met.
“The spectacle of fireflies, an endemic species of Japan, flying through the summer forest is like a scene where the stars in the sky repeat twinkling.”
Born into a family that owned a photo studio, Koseki's fascination with these creatures also dates back to his childhood.
Koseki was delighted to learned these fireflies were also found in the Yamagata prefecture, where he lives, allowing him to venture into the forests at night to see the fireflies' glow.
Koseki explains that the forest-dwelling creatures he photographs are adult males that emit light and fly around the forest in order to pass on the light to the next generation.
“The period is short, lasting from one week to 10 days in early summer, and the beauty of life is felt in the fragility and preciousness of life that can be sensed from the twinkling of light.”
To protect the fireflies, no deliberate artificial lighting is used.
The photographer hopes his images raise aware of the plight of the local fireflies.
“They live under constant threat of our modern times. It is my hope to remind everyone that we have many neighbors living around us all the time, all coexisting together on this planet called Earth.”
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