Photobookstore

• Sokyusha 2020
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

Takashi Hara’s photobook “Yagi to toge” (Goat and Thorns) does not unlock itself to the viewer on the first quick browse-through. Its dark, slow photographs, taken with a medium-format Holga on black-and-white film, do not seem connected on first glance. But there is something about these pictures that hints at a deeper space hiding behind the surface; the longer one looks at the deep blacks and dazzling whites, the pictures reveal their true richness. As the pages add up and the impressions begin to overlap, Hara builds a strange new world of his own, of feelings like unease and allure – a world that evades being fully captured in words, one that can only be glanced at through photography.

“Looking at Yagi to Toge again after these thoughts, I strongly realized that photography exists somewhere beyond logic. Now I see why I could only say that his works gave me the impression of trying to grasp at the air. Indeed, Takashi Hara’s feelings are directly reflected in these photographs.” –– from writer Yoshitaka Takahashi’s essay (included in Japanese & English translation)

• Sokyusha 2019
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

The 27 images in the photobook “Kamiki no oto” are the last photographs Yoshiichi Hara was able to take before his death on December 16, 2019.

Hara started the year traveling to different locations in Japan to photograph Shinto rituals and festivals, his mind always occupied by the idea of a “sound of the breath of god.” Hara, whose works have drawn inspiration from the bible before, had been fascinated by a verse in Genesis 2:7: “God created man from the dust of the ground. He breathed the breath of life into him, giving him a living soul.” Until May 2019, he had shot a total of 40 rolls, filled with scenes where he “visualized that breathing of life into the nostrils of Adam as I pressed the shutter.” Shortly after his return to Tokyo, Hara was rushed into the hospital and learned that he had mere weeks left to live. He had the rolls of film developed: “To me, they clearly portrayed the ‘sound of the breath of God.’”

“I kept a total of 27 prints in the end. I viewed them again and again, listening for that sound over and over. I imagined how If I had just another six months I could have completed this work, but there was nothing I could do.” The book “Kamiki no oto” (a term coined by Hara to describe the sound that inspired him) consists of these 27 prints and was published posthumously.

“I was imagining how in the end my breath would be taken back into God’s breath.
It hasn’t been a bad life.”

• Sokyusha 2019
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

In 1972, still a student at the Chiyoda Design Photography Academy, Yoshiichi Hara headed towards the Tohoku region of Japan for a ten day trip. He had planned to shoot ten rolls of film a day, 360 photographs, one every two minutes. Once developed and printed, the “Tohoku Zanzo” (transl. “Afterimages of Tohoku”) photographs earned him a solo exhibition at Nikon Salon in Ginza.

Thanks to Japanese publisher Sokyusha, Hara’s images are now available again as a photobook. With deep contrast, Hara’s black-and-white photographs capture splenetic scenes and sceneries of a region where the old rural life was being chased by modernity. “Tohoku Zanzo” is both a remarkable document and a fascinating impression of a now-gone facet of Japan.

The book includes an afterword by Yoshiichi Hara (in Japanese and English translation).

• Sokyusha 2019
• Hardback, 1st edition, 72pp
• New

“The sorrow, the joy of the people I pass, the flourishing and decline of the streets reach into me like the voice of living flesh.” — from Keizo Motoda’s afterword

Without the dates clearly stated in the caption of each photograph, it would be difficult to ascertain in which decade Keizo Motoda shot the images in his photobook “Todoroki” (the 2010s). In his street portraits, Motoda lives his fascination with sub- and fringe cultures in Japanese society, from rockabillies, street performers, transvestites and lowrider enthusiasts to traveling buddhist monks. He turns his lens towards those who make the streets interesting.

• Sokyusha 2019
• Hardback, 1st edition
• New

Having learned under, among others, Daido Moriyama in the 1980s, Hiroyoshi Yamazaki spent the 1990s photographing the streets of Tokyo. Caring for his bedridden father at home, Yamazaki used his time outside to capture streetlife in Tokyo in images that each tell little tales and—put together in the book “Crossroads”—form a greater story of life and fashion in the years immediately after Japan’s Bubble had burst. There is, of course, always a historic value to photographs like these, but Yamazaki’s images transcend the status of mere records; there is a lightness to his framings, and a strange, intriguing distance to the scenes not found in other street photographs (of any era).

“It was not from a particular consciousness or awareness that I chose to take snapshots of Tokyo. It’s just a wander down the classic highway of snapshot photography. More than the active pursuit of capturing the shot, today I feel that the true essence of photography is found in what enters into and winds up in the photographs.” (from Hiroyoshi Yamazaki’s afterword)

• T&G 2019
• Hardback, 1st edition, 96pp
• New

Nature Boy is a sequel to Australian photographer Brad Rimmer’s monograph Silence (2009). Probing at the essence of rural Australia and the emotional impact of the natural landscape upon individual psyches. Rimmer this time adds stories to the compendium. The raw, yet poetic narratives conjure the late adolescent years of a lad wrestling with whether to stay or leave his remote country homeland for the lure of the city and so much more. A coming-of-age account the elegant mix of observation and heartfelt reminiscence are almost autobiographical, and hint to the nascent sensibilities of the young Rimmer as an artist.

"Nature Boy is a story about the ordinary; failing high school, the romance and fantasy of falling in love with almost every girl I knew and the sadness of never giving too much away in the pursuit of it. It’s a narrative about the past and its recurrence in the present. Normality is never far away; it’s a narrative that plays out over and over again in a small town.

It was 1981; I was nineteen, in limbo between teenage and adulthood, in youth and boredom drawn to the heady mix of cars and speed, sport and alcohol, any of life’s extremes that presented themselves. That year changed me.

You cannot be untouched by a landscape of absence. I was working on the wheat bins in the north-eastern wheatbelt. An unforgiving land of Mallee and Eucalyptus woodlands and red earth on the edge the grain belt. Where decades of over cropping and droughts create struggle that changes people, mentally and physically.

The memory of impacting incidents and this landscape still resonate with me today, like the red earth that stains everything. Events taken for granted while testing the fragile line between life and death in becoming a man, struggling with the timeless question of ‘should I stay or should I leave’, all a part of finding your place in a small rural fringe community. It’s our history, all of it, including the long-term effects of a single action on subsequent generations, where memories continue to resonate.

How does our history, our experiences and our emotions shape us? How do we arrive at a time in our lives when we can find a comfortable balance between looking back and looking ahead? How does our sensory archive collect sounds, music, smells, colours, shapes and the tiniest details to trigger memories, almost cinematically?

Over the past five years I have returned to the places where I worked on the wheat bins. These visits are still fraught with mixed emotions and disengaging with the past remains difficult. The subjects in my photographs are local young people, the same age I was in 1981. Our meetings are brief and intense. As they surrender to the portrait I can feel that sense of integrity and inquiring honesty that I felt as a teenager, though these subjects have no direct relationship with my past. The people in these photographs own their own histories and their presence speaks of resilience and a personal human condition. Each one is creating their own story, making choices, collecting and storing their memories.

On the last day of summer 2015, in that same wheatbelt landscape, a tragedy occurred. It was personal and while the circumstances leading up to it were sadly predictable, as tragedies seem to flow effortlessly from one generation to the next, it is still hard to accept. Maybe revisiting was a way to reconnect with that reality of place and circumstance that is never far away, reminding me where I came from and why I chose to leave. Now there is another scarred tree on a familiar country road that I can never pass without the memory of loss."

Signed copy.

• T&G 2019
• Hardback, 1st edition, 68pp
• New

From ancient times to the present, the Alps have had mythological, spiritual and romantic significance. Recognisable peaks, like the Matterhorn, have become trademarks for chocolate companies and the like; their rugged profiles filtering into our everyday lives, even in places far away. Over the past century, advances in engineering have made access to viewing platforms easy in the Alps, and now thousands of tourists line up to photograph these scenic vistas every day. For his series Don’t Look Down, Rimmer sought to alter these views, and thereby question the experience of what we already know in our collective memories. By deliberately inverting the image into an unnatural colour palette, the landscapes become foreign and unsettling.

Signed copy, includes signed print (first image shown)

• Bluecoat 2018
• Hardback, 1st edition, 180pp
• New

When Tish Murtha sadly died from a brain aneurysm in 2013, she had largely been forgotten In 2017, her key work, Youth Unemployment, was published to universal acclaim, and was followed by a major retrospective at London’s Photographers Gallery. Tish has now been recognised as a social-documentary photographer of the first rank. She had set out to document “marginalised communities from the inside” and, set against today’s austerity, her work is more relevant than ever. The anger and frustration evident in Youth Unemployment even reached the House of Commons, where it was raised as a subject of debate. Elswick Kids is a less strident set of images. They were taken as Tish walked the streets of the working-class district of Elswick in Newcastle Upon Tyne and were not intended to be an exhibition in their own right. Today, though, they tell of a time when children had the freedom of the streets to play in and where friendship blossomed against a seemingly harsh background. The photographs have a stark beauty that shines from every page. Elswick Kids is a vital contribution to our understanding of life in a northern city in the late twentieth century.

Final few copies of this out of print photobook.