Vanishing Existence

In his series Vanishing Existence (created in 2007), Kosuke Okahara explores everyday life in the so-called leper colonies in China, predominantly in the country’s South. These isolated villages were established in the 1950s to quarantine people suffering from leprosy and provide them with long-term medical care. In the early 2000s, around 600 of these originally 1200 villages were still in operation.

Today, China is on track to entirely eliminate the disease. Those still living in these communities are now of advanced age – meaning that not only the villages themselves, but also the stories of their inhabitants are in the process of disappearing. The project presented at the Musée Cernuschi arose from this realisation: with his images, the photographer seeks to document the lives of these marginalised individuals, focusing on their inner experience rather than the physical after-effects of the disease. Over the course of around six weeks, he travelled to visit several leper communities, accompanied by a friend and a translator. He initially published the resulting images as a photo book with a traditional, hand-sewn binding, before releasing them in the form of a horizontal, 10-metre-long scroll in 2016. 

Kosuke Okahara (b. 1980) has received multiple awards and grants, including the W. Eugene Smith Fellowship, Getty Images Grants for Editorial Photography, and the Pierre & Alexandra Boulat Grant. His series Almost Paradise was featured as part of the 100 Years of Leica Photography exhibition. In addition, LFI Magazine (01.2014) featured a comprehensive portfolio of his reportage on Transnistria, titled No Man’s Land.