Spruce Cove Path started in the spare room of a rented house in Zaimokuza in the spring of 2017. Natsuki Hara had been working as a second shooter for a wedding photography company in Yokohama for four years, carrying someone else's bags and learning, quietly, what she did and did not want to do. What she did not want: flash, speed, the feeling of a production line. What she did want: a room with good light, enough time, and people who came because they wanted to be there.
The name came from a walk. There is a narrow path behind the studio building, lined with old spruce trees that the neighbors have never cut back. In winter the light comes through at a low angle and makes the whole lane glow for about twenty minutes around three in the afternoon. Natsuki walked it every day that first winter and decided the studio needed a name that felt like that path: specific, quiet, a little unexpected. The first proper session was a mother and her two daughters in February 2018. The prints from that day are still on the wall.
Natsuki Hara grew up in Nagano and moved to Kamakura in 2013 after finishing a two-year photography course at Nihon University's College of Art in Nerima. She spent four years as a second shooter for a Yokohama wedding company before opening Spruce Cove Path in 2017. She learned to print in a darkroom above a camera shop in Koenji that has since closed, and still prefers the smell of fixer to almost anything else. She plays Satie on a small Bluetooth speaker most mornings while she sets up the studio. Her longest-running regular, a retired schoolteacher named Fujimoto-san, has been coming in every spring since 2019.