Collapsed House

Provenance

Camera: NIKON D810
Lens: 14.0-24.0 mm f/2.8
Settings: 16mm · f/8.0 · 1/125 · ISO 100
Paper: Ilford Galerie Smooth Cotton Rag 310 gsm

A house in Yubari, Hokkaido, collapses into itself. Its roof and upper storey have fallen, exposing the interior. This structure symbolises the ongoing decline of Japan's former coal mining centre.

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01 PROVENANCE

Print datasheet

Title: Collapsed House
Series: Streetscapes of Yubari
Catalogue: SYU-005
Process: Giclée
Captured: 28 April 2016
Camera: NIKON D810
Lens: 14.0-24.0 mm f/2.8
Aperture: f/8.0
Shutter: 1/125 s
ISO: 100
Focal length: 16 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

A residential house in Yubari, Hokkaido, has had its roof give way under the weight of accumulated snow. The roof is now sagged into the upper rooms, the timber rafters broken at their centres. Snow from the next winter has settled into the collapsed cavity, partly filling what was once a second storey. The walls are still standing, weatherboard and tar-paper, but visibly leaning. The garden around the house is overgrown with grass and scrub, the wooden fence lines fallen away in sections. A power line still runs to the wall, no longer connected to anything.

Hokkaido winters drop more than two metres of snow on Yubari annually. Houses are built with steeply pitched roofs to shed it, and residents shovel the roofs clear after major falls. When a house is left empty, the roof shovelling stops. After several winters, the accumulated snow load reaches the point where the roof structure can no longer carry it, and the roof gives out. The house in this photograph reached that point at some unrecorded time, probably in the 2010s. The collapse is a slow, quiet failure that happens to many empty houses in the city; this one is just one of several visible from the same street.

04 FROM THE FIELD NOTES

Blue corrugated iron cladding covers the front face of a small two-storey structure. The upper section has collapsed inward, exposing bare timber rafters and patchwork repairs of concrete block and flat sheeting. A rusted steel flue rises from the centre. Dead knotweed and scrub press in from every side. A red plastic crate sits half-buried in the undergrowth. Behind the building, bare birch and scattered conifers climb a steep hillside under broken cloud.

Brett Patman

The series

Streetscapes of Yubari

2018 · 54 photographs

Yūbari is a coal-mining city in central Hokkaido. Founded in 1943, its population peaked at around 120,000 in the 1960s and now sits at about 6,400. The colliery closed in the 1980s. The city's attempt to recover through tourism failed; in 2007 it became the first Japanese municipality to declare bankruptcy, owing 35.3 billion yen. These streetscapes were taken between the houses, shops, and schools the town no longer needs - most empty, some half-collapsed, some still in use by the people who stayed.

View all in this series →

05 SIZE GUIDE

Print sizes

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