Guest Room

Provenance

Camera: NIKON D810
Lens: 14.0-24.0 mm f/2.8
Settings: 14mm · f/9.0 · 1/15 · ISO 100
Paper: Ilford Galerie Smooth Cotton Rag 310 gsm

Dust settles on tatami mats inside a guest room at Kinugawa Kan. Sunlight filters through grimy windows, illuminating peeling wallpaper and forgotten belongings. The room stands silent, a relic of a past era.

Edition

Open edition

Open edition
Printed to order, no fixed quantity. Each print is hand-signed by the photographer.

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

$100.00 AUD

Colour

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: Guest Room
Series: Kinugawa Kan
Catalogue: KKA-008
Process: Giclée
Captured: 9 May 2016
Camera: NIKON D810
Lens: 14.0-24.0 mm f/2.8
Aperture: f/9.0
Shutter: 1/15 s
ISO: 100
Focal length: 14 mm
Paper: Ilford Galerie Smooth Cotton Rag 310 gsm
Paper size: 290 × 200 mm
Location: Nikko, Tochigi, Japan
Authenticity: C2PA verified provenance →
Recognised by: National Trust of Australia (NSW), 2016 Heritage Award, Multimedia

02 LOCATION

Nikko, Tochigi, Japan

Map · Mapbox · OpenStreetMap

03 THE STORY

About this print

A guest room at Kinugawa Kan sits along the river side of the building, the tatami flooring partially uplifted where moisture has worked at the matting from below. A low table sits in the centre of the room, with two zaisu floor chairs facing it. A futon is folded against the wall. The shoji panels along the back wall have lost most of their paper, leaving the timber lattice exposed. Light comes through the empty lattice in broken patterns across the tatami. The fusuma sliding door to the corridor is closed. Beyond the window, the Kinugawa River gorge drops away.

This was a standard mid-grade guest room at the hotel: not the largest or the cheapest, but the kind a couple from Tokyo would have booked for a weekend in the late 1980s. The room slept two on futons laid out by the staff after dinner. Meals were taken downstairs in the dining hall, with the baths a short walk along the corridor. Kinugawa Kan declared bankruptcy in June 1999, the first major ryokan in the gorge to fall after the bubble economy ended. The room has been sealed since.

04 FROM THE FIELD NOTES

A low chabudai table sits at the centre of the room, zaisu chairs still positioned around it. Cushions rest on the tatami. Shoji screens stand intact, their washi paper diffusing green-tinted light from the forested hillside beyond the balcony. A red CRT television and rotary telephone sit on a shelf beside a veneer-clad heater unit. Broken porcelain lies scattered across the tatami near the wall. Dust coats every surface.

Brett Patman

The series

Kinugawa Kan

2016 · 22 photographs

Kinugawa Kan ran on the Kinugawa River gorge in Tochigi Prefecture from December 1942 until June 1999. Nine storeys above the river, 70 rooms, one restaurant. The first hotel at Kinugawa Onsen to fall in the post-bubble era.

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.