Masuyama was born and raised in the village of Tokuyama, in Gifu Prefecture. After losing her husband during the war, she farmed in the village while running a minshuku (guest-house). In 1957, a plan emerged to build a dam in this quiet village and Tokuyama—which Masuyama described as “a heaven, where everyone lived in laughter”—split between promoters of the dam project and skeptics. Masuyama picked up a camera for the first time in her life in 1977, when the Tokuyama dam project began to take on momentum. She had just turned 60. “When it comes to war and dams, the state always carries through, once they’ve decided to do it,” she remarked. Facing the demise of a village that dated back to prehistoric times, she decided that she would at least capture what could be captured, and walked through every corner of the village, shooting with her trusty Pikkari Konica.

The media spotlighted Masuyama from time to time, and she became known with the nickname Camera Grandma. Shooting her first photographs at the village athletic meet, she poured most of the income from her pension into photography for years. She continued to visit the village after it was condemned in 1987, and carried on shooting her disappearing birthplace until she died in 2006, at age 88. She left behind negatives of 100,000 photographs and some 600 photo albums.
The Tokuyama Dam was completed in 2008, fifty years after it was first proposed, and the area where the village was now sits at the bottom of a reservoir, but the photographs she left behind communicate to us today life in the old days of Tokuyama village.
The exhibition features Masuyama’s albums and the sounds of the village that she recorded herself, along with pressed flowers made from plants in the village.

*photo (left)
Just at Peak Bloom, 1985
© Tazuko Masuyama
Courtesy of Izu Photo Museum