The sea wall / Island without green, Gunkanjima from "Human Land"

After graduating from Matsue High School and while attending the graduate school of Waseda University, Narahara held "Human Land," his first one-man exhibition, in 1956. He made an impactful debut, redefining conventional photographic expressions. He captured images of people living isolated from the outside world, but with remarkable strength, on Hashima Island (commonly called Gunkanjima [Battleship Island]), a manmade mining island off the coast of Nagasaki, and Kurokami-mura on Sakurajima Island, which is buried in lava. He compiled these with the meticulous concept of contrasting the human versus social mechanisms concept of Gunkanjima, completely lacking in greenery, and the human versus nature concept of Kurokami-mura, situated at the base of a fiery mountain. This became a monumental work in photographic history.