Fotografi

LOVE HOTEL is a collection of photographs showing Japanese Love Hotels facades. The project was produced in 2023 during a road trip between Tokyo and Shikoku Island. Photographer Francois Prost paints a vernacular portrait of Japan, made up of ordinary roadsides, faded signs and colorful facades, far from the usual cliches.

Ayako Endo's photobook "Swaying Flowers" deals with one of the most ubiquitous themes in visual media - flowers. Endo, whose work as a photographer range from the world of art to the world of fashion, took a unique approach to capturing her subjects. After taking photographs of flowers, she printed them on fabric, tore the fabric surrounding the images, and scanned the results. This elaborate process softens the mechanical nature of the photographic images and produces captivating colors and textures that almost add an element of touch to the act of seeing. Endo's subjects subjects range from simple bouquets to wild bushes and tended gardens. Whether close-up, blurred or well-composed, there is an immediacy and directness to her images that contrasts with the conventionally serene (or sexually charged) atmosphere of flower photography.

With more than 8 million users per day, Tokyo's subways are a pulsating aorta supplying the city with life. Since his student days, Masakazu Murakami has been capturing the scenes unfolding underground as a fellow passenger.Murakami kept shooting as Japan entered its long recession after the burst of the Bubble, the people at the other end of his gaze seemingly lost in a city without exits, drifting through Tokyo's subway system as if it were an endless sea.

"Dawn in Spring" brings back the earliest works of Japanese photographer Asako Narahashi. Originally shot in 1989, a decisive period not only for the then-unknown artist, Narahashi exhibited the images from her "Dawn in Spring" series four separate times throughout the year. Including previously unshown images, this book represents the first time her series is made available in print. After taking part in Daido Moriyama's "FotoSession" workshop in the mid-80s, 1989 was the year her time as a university student would end. With an undecided future ahead of her, Narahashi travelled through Japan - Kumamoto, Miyakejima, Hakata, Yokohama, Hachinohe, Yuzawa, Tokyo... - and inadvertently laid the foundation for her photographic career. Despite the long time between these photographs and her breakthrough in the latter half of the 90s, the black-and-white images in "Dawn of Spring" already reveal the acute sensibilities of this exceptional artist.

"1/1" is Takashi Yasumura's fourth photographic series which follows "Domestic Scandals," "Nature Tracing" and "If This is a Planet". Yasumura commenced this series in 2008, and continued shooting throughout Japan until 2015. While Yasumura has occasionally shown this work in solo and group exhibitions, this collection compiles together one hundred and eleven works, including many of which have never been shown before.

This 2023 reprint of Daido Moriyama's "Farewell Photography" brings back one of the master photographer's most influential and controversial works. This edition is based on the 2019 publication of "Farewell Photography" by Getsuyosha (itself based on the original publication by Shashin Hyoronsha in 1972) but features a different binding and a more compact size. Created at a pivotal moment in Moriyama's career, "Farewell Photography" represents a radical exploration of the limits of photography and expression-uncompromising, invasive, and intimate. Fifty years after its original publication, the series has lost none of its impact. This edition includes the full version of the Hilltop Hotel interview between Daido Moriyama and Takuma Nakahira (in Japanese only) as well as Daido Moriyama's afterword (originally written for the 2019 edition; in Japanese & English).

"Provocative Relationship - Daido Moriyama x Takuma Nakahira" is the official catalog for the exhibition of the same title, held at The Museum of Modern Art, Hayama from July 15 to September 24, 2023. Both the catalog and the exhibition represent an invaluable attempt to trace the artistic relationship between Daido Moriyama and Takuma Nakahira, as well as the complex and fundamental ways in which they have influenced each other. Moriyama and Nakahira first met through Shomei Tomatsu in the 1960s, worked together on the highly-influential "Provoke" magazine, and continued to stimulate each other's creative and intellectual approach until Nakahira's death in 2015. In addition to photographs documenting the exhibition itself, the book explores their relationship in seven chronological chapters. The book concludes with several texts written by both photographers, as well as an edited version of the infamous Hilltop Hotel interview between Moriyama and Nakahira. Please note that all text is only included in Japanese.

Daido Moriyama's photobook "Letters to N" is a personal message from Moriyama to his good friend, the late Takuma Nakahira. Shot with a digital camera in the Shonan region, including the towns of Kamakura, Zushi, and Hayama, Moriyama drafts a visual letter composed of everyday scenes in black and white to his dear companion. The book includes an afterword by Moriyama and a series of letters to Takuma written thirty years ago, after Takuma suffered a loss of memory, and originally published in a literary magazine (all text included in Japanese & in English translation). "I know you love the summer, so I wonder, are you still visiting Zushi and the beach there? Are you still chasing fish around the cliffs at Hayama? When you're in the water, to me you almost looked like a fish yourself. Are you still spending time at the sea where we used to go for a dive almost every day?"? from Daido Moriyama's letter to Nakahira from January 1988

"The dog in me tells me to seek out bustling streets, the cat tells me to enter every back-alley I come across, and the bug in me drags me towards the red-light quarters. Copying the world from the view of a lowlife, particularly loitering through Tokyo every day, I feel that this is all the meaning there is to my life and my taking photographs. " (from Daido Moriyama's afterword)"K" (from the Japanese "kei" for "view, vista") collects Daido Moriyama's latest photographs, fragments of the city, its corners and crannies of the city, the figures that populate it.

"The title of this book, Dog and Mesh Tights came to me suddenly one day recently as I was walking through the streets of the Ikebukuro district of Tokyo. Most of the subjects depicted here are those that I spotted on the streets, on the exterior walls of buildings or lying in the gutter during the course of my everyday life, things that tend to remain unnoticed, obscure corners of largely deserted back alleys, or human figures that linger inconspicuously - things that catch my eye but generally remain unremarked. In a way I think they can be said to resemble the world as seen through the eye of a dog" - Daido Moriyama

Daido Moriyama's "Paris Plus" is a small hardcover publication containing 311 images within its 504 pages. Published in 2013 by Getsuyosha, "Paris Plus" is a visually condensed photographic narrative of several visits Moriyama has made to the city in between the years 1988, 1990 and 2003. The images of Paris bound within the pages of this photobook is as much a documentation of the city's people and landscapes as much as it is a remnant of Moriyama's fragmented experiences and engagements with the city throughout his life. The black and white images run through from page to page, echoing the shutter's lens as much as it does the photographing eye. What is evident within this small hardcover publication is a record of a series of moments, capturing a visualized experience of a city space and its individuals caught within movement and frozen within the exposed black and white film within Moriyama's frame.