On Saturday, April 16, the Farnsworth Art Museum will open an exhibition of photographs by Japanese photographer Koichiro Kurita. Entitled From the Smallest Leaf, this exhibition of the artist’s Maine photographs will be on display in the museum’s Crosman Gallery through September 11, 2016.

Japanese photographer Koichiro Kurita  graduated from Kanseigakuin University in Kobe, where he studied perceptual psychology. He worked as a young man for a Tokyo advertising agency before becoming a successful commercial photographer. At forty years old, moved by his reading of Thoreau’s Walden, Koichiro Kurita directed his photography away from commercial work toward meditative expressions of his connection to nature.

Kurita’s impressions of the natural world—quiet New England woodlands, remote Boundary Waters lakes and rocks of Minnesota and Canada, and natural features of California and Japan—extract poetic details from the greater landscape, giving “pictorial form to Thoreau’s ideas.” His use of nineteenth-century printing processes to create monochromatic prints from his camera work, the result of platinum palladium, albumen and salt printing development on Japanese papers, enhances the historic yet timeless qualities of his hand-made prints.  This selection of his photographs encompasses nature as Kurita sees it in terms of “Chi Sui Ki,” or terrasphere, hydrosphere and atmosphere, and the borders that each of these realms share with one another and ourselves.

Farnsworth members will enjoy a special preview of the exhibition on Friday, April 15, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. The exclusive media sponsor of this exhibition is Maine Home + Design.