Toby de Silva, London

Toby de Silva was born in England in 1972 and studied photography at Falmouth School of Art followed a few years later by an MA in Fine Art Photography at the University of Westminster. Based between London and Tokyo he travels extensively to document the bizarre, the macabre, the sublime, the hideous and the humorous. Of this series, The Perfect Place to Die, he says, ‘Situated at the base of sacred Mount Fuji, the dark, grotesque and eerily silent forest of Aokigahara has for many years been Japans most notorious suicide destination. Often depicted in Japanese literature as haunted and deathly, it was described in Waturu Tsurumi’s The Complete Manual of Suicide as ‘The Perfect Place To Die’. The 3500 hectare forest is founded upon volcanic rock, which juts and plummets with uncertainly in all directions and is littered with the personal effects, clothing and mechanisms of suicide of its many victims, along with bouquets of flowers, shrines and food offerings left in their memory. It annually yields in excess of 60 corpses, many of which are removed in the regular body hunts which infamously leave behind the miles of colored tape which are used as guides to mark out the areas that have been surveyed and to direct recovery teams to the newly discovered remains’.