Gymnasium

Provenance

Camera: NIKON D810
Lens: 14.0-24.0 mm f/2.8
Settings: 19mm · f/9.0 · 1/60 · ISO 80
Paper: Ilford Galerie Smooth Cotton Rag 310 gsm

Inside the abandoned gymnasium of Family School Fureai, sunlight illuminates a dusty wooden floor. Faded lines mark former courts. The silence now echoes where children once played games.

Edition

Open edition

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A fixed number of prints exist. Once sold, the edition closes permanently. Each print is individually numbered and signed.

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Signed, numbered, with COA. Made to order in 10 to 20 business days (framed). Shipped in protective packaging with edition certificate, paper-stock reference and a printed care guide.

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In situ

01 PROVENANCE

Print datasheet

Title: Gymnasium
Series: Family School Fureai
Catalogue: FSF-015
Process: Giclée
Captured: 28 April 2016
Camera: NIKON D810
Lens: 14.0-24.0 mm f/2.8
Aperture: f/9.0
Shutter: 1/60 s
ISO: 80
Focal length: 19 mm
Paper: Ilford Galerie Smooth Cotton Rag 310 gsm
Paper size: 290 × 200 mm
Location: Yubari, Hokkaido, Japan
Authenticity: C2PA verified provenance →
Recognised by: Highly Commended in Multimedia at the 2016 National Trust of Australia (NSW) Heritage Awards

02 LOCATION

Yubari, Hokkaido, Japan

Map · Mapbox · OpenStreetMap

03 THE STORY

About this print

The Family School Fureai gymnasium runs the full width of one side of the building, a high-ceilinged hall with timber-strip flooring and rows of tall windows down one side. The flooring is buckled in places where damp has come up through the substrate. Painted court lines for basketball and volleyball are still visible. The high windows let in cold light from the north side of the building. Sports equipment, including ropes hanging from the ceiling beams and a few wooden vaulting horses pushed to one wall, has not been moved since the school stopped using the room.

The gymnasium was the largest space in the school and served the same range of functions as gymnasia in mainland Japanese schools generally: sports, assembly, performance, and the annual sports day that almost every school in the country observes. After the elementary school closed in 1983 the gymnasium continued in use during the dormitory phase from 1994 to 2007. After 2007 the building was left as it was. The hall in this photograph still has the equipment racked along the walls, the painted lines on the floor, and the basketball hoops at each end. Nothing has been taken out, even after a decade of empty.

04 FROM THE FIELD NOTES

A thick climbing rope lies coiled across the gymnasium floor like something shed. The timber surface is gone, scoured back to bare concrete and grime. Overhead, steel trusses fan outward beneath corrugated panels stained orange with rust. A basketball backboard hangs centred against a massive arched window wall, its grid of glass panes flooding the space with flat, grey light. Green-painted steel columns support a mezzanine on both sides. A table tennis table sits folded near the back wall. Japanese characters are visible on a banner to the left.

Brett Patman

The series

Family School Fureai

2016 · 30 photographs

Family School Fureai stands on a hillside at the northern end of Yubari in Hokkaido. The building opened on 1 April 1975 as Asahi Elementary School, a new three-storey reinforced-concrete structure built on the site of the demolished wooden Yubari Second Elementary (Daini). It consolidated three local schools - Daini, Fukuzumi and Teibi - that had lost most of their students as Yubari's coal industry shrank. By the early 1980s enrolment had collapsed; the school closed on 31 March 1983 after just eight years. The building stayed empty until Yubari City's tourism third-sector firm Yubari Kanko Kaihatsu, established October 1994, repurposed it as the Family School Fureai public dormitory. In June 2006 Yubari City announced its fiscal collapse; the city formally entered financial reconstruction status on 6 March 2007 and YKK ceased trading 31 March 2007 with ¥5.46 billion of debt. The building has sat empty since. Inside there is no graffiti - only kanji on the chalkboards. Deer and foxes use it now.

View all in this series →

05 SIZE GUIDE

Print sizes

The anatomy view shows what this finish is as a physical object: paper margin, mat band, frame depth, acrylic profile. The comparison strip shows how each size sits relative to the others at true scale. Click a size or a finish to update both.