Sawatari fell in love with the Italian fashion model Nadia while working with her on an advertisement back in 1971. Driven by the photographer’s desire to capture on film everything about the person he loved, Sawatari took the model with him on an extensive journey. Traveling around Karuizawa in the summer, Venice and other locations in Nadia’s home country, Karuizawa in the Winter, and Tokyo, his focus on Nadia switched between viewing her as a photographic subject and a lover, resulting in a photographic story of mysterious beauty blending aspects of reality and fiction. Through “Nadia”, Sawatari established his own unique semi-fictional style of “capturing a woman in a back-and-forth between reality and fiction,” which marked a clear departure from his previous female portraits, and opened a new frontier in the realm of photography.
“Nadia” eventually became known as a series that is being referred to as a leading work of postwar Japanese photography still today, and that represents the photographic oeuvre of Hajime Sawatari.
