Where is the true center of the world? Does the world revolve around us or around them? Is it time to revive the debate between geocentrism and heliocentrism, reframed in a modern context?

Indonesia, India, Benin, Peru, Mongolia, Japan: the images here capture vast steppes, 5,000-meter peaks, expanses of reddish, arid land—lands completely unlike anything we know in our daily lives—along with the people who inhabit them, faithful to their ancestral values and traditions. As our eyes meet theirs, we cannot help but recall the central theme of the series, “the center of the world,” and ask ourselves: Where is this center really located? Here, where we are now? Or there, among the people of the so-called margins of the planet? Their gazes, which watch us from their photographs, disturb our notion of centrality and transform our vision of the world.

This volume, a follow-up to Boundary (Seigensha, 2021), presents the first new works in four years from a photographer who has traveled to more than 140 countries and regions around the world.

Uruma Takezawa was born in 1977 and worked as a staff photographer for a diving magazine before becoming a freelance photographer in 2004. Among his most important publications are Walkabout (Shogakukan, 2013), a photographic record of an epic 1,021-day journey through 103 countries; The Songlines (Shogakukan, 2015), a memoir of the same journey; and Boundary (Seigensha, 2021), featuring images of the land and people of Iceland. In 2015, he held a solo exhibition, Land, in New York, which received widespread acclaim from the press and the public. He is the winner of the Nikkei National Geographic Photo Prize 2014 Grand Prize. Takezawa travels around the world in search of his recurring theme: “the land,” which in his conception encompasses both the territory and the people whose lives are intrinsically linked to it. His artistic name, Uruma, means “coral island” in Okinawan and is a tribute to the island seas, which inspired him to pursue photography.