Japanese Photobooks

• Self 2020
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• New
  

Small book by Koji Onaka featuring a set of coloured vintage photographs.

Edition of 500 copies.  Signed copy.

• Akaaka 2019
  
• Softcover, 1st edition
  
• New

Emi Anrakuji’s “Balloon Position” is a stream-of-conscious-like unfolding of the artist’s conflicted soul. Taken twenty years ago, the soft, sensual black-and-white photos form a visual poem about loneliness and existential confusion.

“I cannot explain this photobook in words.”
– Emi Anrakuji

Edition of 500 copies. 

Shortlisted for Paris Photo Aperture Foundation Photobook of the Year 2019.

• Littlemore 2022
  
• Softcover, 9th printing
  
• New

9th printing.

• Akio Nagasawa 2019
• Softcover, 1st edition
  
• New
  

The 4th in a series of hand-bound Moriyama publications with silkscreen-printed covers features a series of Moriyama's most memorable self-portraits from over the years.

Signed and numbered edition of 350 copies only.

• Mack Books 2019
  
• Hardback, new edition
  
• New
  

My entire family, whose image I see inverted in the frosted glass, will die one day. This camera, which reflects and freezes their images, is actually a device for archiving death’. – Masahisa Fukase

For three generations the Fukase family ran a photography studio in Bifuka, a small provincial town in the northern Japanese province of Hokkaido. In August 1971, at the age of 35, Masahisa Fukase returned home from Tokyo, where he had moved in the 1950s. He realised that the Fukase Photographic Studio, which his younger brother managed, combined with the growing family members, constituted the perfect subject for a series of portraits. Between 1971 and 1989, he returned regularly and used the family studio, the large-format Anthony view camera and the changing family line-up as the basis for the series. True to his style, Fukase often introduced third-party models and humorous elements to juxtapose the ineluctable reality of time passing and the dwindling family group. He continued the series through his father’s death in 1987, up until the closure of the Fukase studio due to bankruptcy in 1989, and the consequential dispersion of the family.

Family (Kazoku) was released in 1991, and was Fukase’s last book. It begins with a photograph of the family studio and the following 31 images are family portraits made in the studio in chronological order. The book includes an extensive autobiography written by Fukase himself.

• Mack Books 2019
  
• Hardback, with print
  
• New
  

My entire family, whose image I see inverted in the frosted glass, will die one day. This camera, which reflects and freezes their images, is actually a device for archiving death’. – Masahisa Fukase

For three generations the Fukase family ran a photography studio in Bifuka, a small provincial town in the northern Japanese province of Hokkaido. In August 1971, at the age of 35, Masahisa Fukase returned home from Tokyo, where he had moved in the 1950s. He realised that the Fukase Photographic Studio, which his younger brother managed, combined with the growing family members, constituted the perfect subject for a series of portraits. Between 1971 and 1989, he returned regularly and used the family studio, the large-format Anthony view camera and the changing family line-up as the basis for the series. True to his style, Fukase often introduced third-party models and humorous elements to juxtapose the ineluctable reality of time passing and the dwindling family group. He continued the series through his father’s death in 1987, up until the closure of the Fukase studio due to bankruptcy in 1989, and the consequential dispersion of the family.

Family (Kazoku) was released in 1991, and was Fukase’s last book. It begins with a photograph of the family studio and the following 31 images are family portraits made in the studio in chronological order. The book includes an extensive text written by Fukase himself and a modern essay by Tomo Kosuga.

Embossed hardback bound in red buckram, housed in a silkscreened sleeve. Collotype print produced by Japanese atelier Benrido. Print size: 26 x 17 cm 

Limited edition of 150 copies, each comprising of a first MACK edition book and print [both numbered and stamped by the Masahisa Fukase Archives].

• Akio Nagasawa 2019
  
• Hardback, facsimile edition
  
• new

“Light and Shadow,” Daido Moriyama’s classic from 1982, finally available again in a new edition by Bookshop M & Getsuyousha.

The photobook marked Moriyama’s return to photography, ten years after his previous photobook publication and three years after he basically stopped photographing altogether. “Light and Shadow” also marks an evolution in Moriyama’s photography, with the moodiness of earlier works replaced by a clearer focus on objects and the early bure-boke having evolved into a richer, high-contrast style.

The English version features a hardcover reprint of Moriyama’s 1982 photobook as well as a booklet with detailed information to each photograph, exclusive commentary by Daido Moriyama, and an interview originally published in the September 1981 issue of the magazine “Shashin Jidai” (all in English translation).


Signed by Daido Moriyama.   English Edition of 1000 copies.

• Mack Books 2019
• Softcover, 1st Mack edition
  
• New
  

In this dark and beautiful book, Takashi Homma traces the blood trails of deers killed in Shiretoko National Park on the Japanese island of Hokkaido. Like ritualistic stains or calligraphic compositions, the photographs, which Homma made in the winters of 2009 to 2018, are at once abstract and symbolic. Considered by some to be sacred, deers in Japan have controversially faced culls due to growing populations, which upset agricultural communities struggling to protect their crops. To aid their mission in reducing numbers, the government encourages local hunters to take matters into their own hands. Homma photographs the effects – the red vestiges of wild life in the snow.

Out of print, final copies.

• Editorial RM 2018
  
• 1st trade edition
  
• New
  

30 years have passed since world’s worst nuclear accident happened at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant (ChNPP) in the former Soviet Union (currently, Ukraine). Photojournalist Kazuma Obara explored Ukraine from February 2015 to April 2016.

Project “30” aims to depict people in Ukraine who have a connection to the explosion; whose lives were altered by the sudden release of atomic energy and subsequent political strife. To depict this, Obara challenged traditional visual representation by creating 3 different types of object: two photobooks and a replica of newspaper. The photobook “Exposure” depicts the first 30 years of life of an invisible girl who suffers ongoing medical problems as a result of the disaster. The images were created by using old Ukrainian colour negative film which was found in the abandoned city of Pripyat. Another photobook, “Everlasting,” captured the commute of the ChNPP’s workers between their hometown and the plant as a metaphor for the cycle of repetition. Decontamination work has been handed down from generation to generation since the accident.

Given the difficulty of dealing with radioactive waste it seems as though this process could go on for ever. Supporting those two photobooks, Obara make the replica of an old newspaper which was found in Pripyat from the time helps to feel the passing of time.

• Ceiba 2017
  
• Hardback, trade edition with print
  
• New
  

I have this desire to sum up my life in the form of a story.

My parents killed themselves, one after the other, in the winter of 1998.

My mother’s depression led her to take her own life, and my father followed her nine days later. Having suddenly a closer relationship with death at just 21 years of age, I decided to write down the things I saw around me, as they were, and to capture in photographs the emotions I would only be able to feel then and there.

I was alone in the house we had all lived in as a family. I had almost completely lost sight of the point in living. But even so, I kept on living. Though my parents weren’t there, I had the many paintings my father left me and the family pictures my mother loved taking. They spoke to me and consoled me.

Happiness is “living alongside the people you love”.

Surrounded and engulfed in the love of my parents, I was taught the meaning of happiness. Now, after being blessed with a new family and a child of my own, I am surprised to find myself having conversations with my parents who still live on inside me. The look I give my child overlaps with the look my parents once wrapped me in.It is then I sense my parents are still here with me and I get a feeling of happiness, like I am being watched over.

If you are able to share your love for someone, perhaps you never really die.

In order to continue living with the people I love, I want to share with my family what I have learned from my parents. I would like to also share it with all of you in this book.
- Junpei Ueda

Special edition with a signed print on Hahnemuhle PhotoRag Baryta 315 gsm, 20 x 30 cm.  Choice of sea or trees image.

• Akio Nagasawa 2017
  
• Softcover, 1st edition
  
• New
  

It was a long, long time ago. Each of them was sleeping in a liquid inside a small flask about the size of a human thumb. All of them had oyster-colored skins, and were shaped like shrimps.

In a glass case at the end of a row of shelves in a dark corridor of an obstetrics and gynecology hospital near the Tanzawa mountains in Kanagawa, countless fetuses in formaldehyde were quietly leaning on each other as they looked out into the sun-drenched courtyard.

-Daido Moriyama-

In addition to the items published in Gendai-no-me, this first copy book dedicated to this particular series features mostly shots that haven’t been shown before.


Edition of 600 signed and numbered copies with a silkscreen canvas cover.

• spewedition 2017 
  
• Softcover, 1st edition
  
• New
  

spewediton is a publishing label that unites the Japanese photographers/ artists Daisuke YOKOTA, Naohiro UTAGAWA and Koji KITAGAWA. The artists mix abstract and concrete expressions to try and overcome the limits of photographic expression.

Sealed.  Limited edition of 300 copies.

• Mack Books 2012
  
• Hardback, 1st edition
  
• Near fine
  

Transparency is the new mystery comprises twenty-two images of nudes and crystals, by Japanese photographer Mayumi Hosokura. The fragile silhouette of a hand, a coiled nude body, or the transfixing symmetry of crystalline minerals are shown in soft, translucent black and white images, held together by an enigmatic interior logic.

I was prepared for the transformation of the forest – the crystalline tress hanging like icons in those luminous covers, the jewelled casements of the leaves overhead, fused into a lattice of prisms, through which the sun shone in a thousand rainbows, the birds and crocodiles frozen into grotesque postures like heraldic beasts carved from jade and quartz…

JG Ballard, The Crystal World

Final few slightly imperfect copies with a faint bump to spine end/corner

• Editorial RM 2015
  
• Hardback 1st trade edition
• New
  

Silent Histories is a testimony to the tragedy of indiscriminate bombing by  US forces during the War in the Pacific, which killed 330,000 Japanese and in-jured 430,000 more. The figures are imposing: some 9.7 million left homeless and more than 2.23 million homes destroyed in more than 200 different cities. In the midst of this enormous destruction, many children were orphaned in an instant or suffered burning or mutilations that marked them for life.

Japan achieved its economic recovery in the wake of wartime devastation. This remarkable growth has been dubbed the “Japanese economic miracle.”  In spite of this unprecedented prosperity, however, children with war injuries have been forced to live harsh lives, unable to cure their wounds. They have lived in the shadows, concealing their pain, hiding their scars, and sparing others the discomfort of seeing them.

Silent Histories was originally published in 2014 in a special limited edition of forty-five handmade copies.  This new edition is published in an edition of 1900 copies and will not be reprinted.

Highly recommended.

Note: the 2 missing inserts in the book are as intended by the artist.