Toshiki Nakanishi’s "Where We Come From and Where We Might Go" is the final part of his Hokkaido trilogy, following "New Land – Pre-Hokkaido Landscapes" (2023) and "Land of Fusion" (2024).
Throughout the three books, Nakanishi used his unique approach to landscape photography to engage with Hokkaido from varying perspectives and in different dimensions: in "New Land" he imagined Hokkaido before humanity, in photos that seem as if taken on another planet; in "Land of Fusion," his focus was on the Okhotsk people who arrived on the island from the north, tracing remaining ruins and imagining the island as they might have experienced it.
With "Where We Come From and Where We Might Go," Nakanishi changes his perspective once again. Mainly through photographs of Hokkaido’s volcanoes, he reflects on nature both as the origin and stage of all life, and on how it has influenced the way humans perceive and shape the world.

“I tried to grasp nature beyond the human scale, refraining from subjectivity as best as I could, while also capturing traces of the invisible social structures that lie hidden within landscapes. In the process, I came to understand that nature knows no boundaries; they are purely the result of human thought. Mountains, rivers, oceans, and hills may represent geographical separations, but the decision to regard them as boundaries depends entirely on human consensus. Nature is entirely fluid; everything is connected. The world is, fundamentally, a boundless continuity. If there are fractures, they are not the product of nature but a manifestation of our own gaze and ideology.”
― from Toshiki Nakanishi’s afterword