Friends,
I hope this finds you well, or at least dry. Summers in Kyoto are usually unbearably hot affairs, with the sun torching everything and all living creatures scurrying for shade. However, it has not stopped raining for the past two weeks and the ten-days forecast suggests more of the same. And by rain, I mean a hard rain, sometimes biblically hard, our windows deluged with torrents of water. Our son, Tennbo, is on summer break, so we are at home mostly, with movies, books, drawing tools, and toys, scurrying out with the dog on brisk walks during breaks in the weather.
Beyond stormy skies, the more important news is that my publishers and I are ready to accept pre-orders for both of my new books, The Sniper Paused So He Could Wipe His Brow, published by The (M) Editions & IBASHO Gallery in Paris, and Amoeba, published by Neutral Colors in Tokyo. There have been some delays in getting the books ready, but that is because of the quality and ingenuity that has gone into the design of both projects.
Both books are very different from one another, and I can say with some pride, both are quite unique from most other books in the marketplace. One I worked on for fifteen years, the other I pitched during the beginning of Covid, as to give me some purpose in going through my archive and meditating on the meaning of love and commitment. I’m so very pleased to be sharing this news with all of you.
The Sniper Paused So He Could Wipe His Brow: This photo book is something like a journey. Fifteen years, twenty countries, ninety-five images, three parts. It’s a book inspired by travel, as many of the photographs were made in a very vivid period in my life when I was on the road, getting my miles in before I became a father and had to introduce stability into my life. The book opens with a doorway and a man in a cave—the allegorical one made famous by Plato— and moves outwards through chaos, characters, and surreal landscapes to a place approximating peace. There is no text, except for around two dozen poems in the middle section, written in a haiku format, but closer to micro-storytelling at its core.
All of the photographs were made with a Diana f+ toy camera, which I first bought in the autumn of 2007. It’s a cheap $50 camera that shoots with medium format film. I took this camera everywhere for about six years, and many of the images I took turned out to be duds because the exposure or depth of field weren’t correctly set. Not a lot of folks shoot regularly with toy cameras for this very reason, as there’s a bit of a long learning curve and a lot of heartbreak when you get your negatives back and the photographs are blurry or exposed incorrectly. But when you’re able to get it right with a Diana (or a Holga), the effect is something painterly and exquisite and somehow redeems the camera and you the photographer for prior blunders.
For many years I was writing haiku to pair with the images as an exercise. Usually the photographs came first and I would ruminate on how to write something that might complement the pictures. The following is how I framed the project over the years while it was a work-in-progress:
“Photography is a challenge to the ephemeral inevitability of life, a moment framed in a certain tableau by a certain machine. On the other hand, haiku poetry celebrates the impermanence of things, designing a poem out of the transitory nature of being. Both can have an instant, strong, fairly emotional resonance. The project, The Sniper Paused So He Could Wipe His Brow, pairs them together so that, very briefly, a story is told. All photographs for the project were shot with a Diana f+, a classic toy camera with highly imperfect mechanics, but occasional tendencies towards wow aesthetics.”
Over the first ten years working on the project, I had no idea how it might be organized. I considered it a photo book with poems, rater than an illustrated poetry book, so I wanted the photographs to have primacy. In November, 2018, I took a bookmaking class with Teun van der Heijden and Sandra van der Doelen at Yumi Goto’s dojo in Tokyo. In ten days, I produced a dummy book with a good template going forward. It was shaped like a poetry chapbook and organized in checkered squares (as the photos were in square format). All of the poems were hand-scribbled in my best possible cursive on the same pages as the photographs. This was less than ideal because the poems were a distraction from the visual immediacy of the book. Consider when you are in a museum, how most of us tend to look at a painting’s or photograph’s caption before gazing at the image itself. We naturally look to text before visually studying an image, which can compromise the rhythm of a photo book’s experience.
The dummy, while a book, was more like a blueprint for what would become published as the trade edition. A very imaginative designer, Laure-Anne Kayser, took the checkered format and made it much more interesting: the top and bottom half of the pages in Parts I and III were cut in half into flaps. It’s a remarkable idea because the book can read differently every time you view it, depending on how the flaps line up. Every viewing has a potentially unique sequencing of imaging, making it a very playful, engaging design.
Whereas the layouts in Parts I & III are four images that can be switched about, the middle section of Part II consists of large single images presented full bleed over two pages. The photographs in Part II have the poems, but they are printed in a small font on the side of the photograph (the book needs to be turned for reading), an inconspicuous placing of text that will not distract from the impact of the photographs. As mentioned before, this was vitally important to me, as I want the book to be consumed primarily as a visual experience.
Part II has three gatefolds in which one photo opens up to two new ones inside. And we utilized different paper types for the different layouts, Parts I & III a very shiny glossy and Part II a beautiful matte. It really is a photo book that transcends traditional format limits into something interactive and multi-layered for the reader’s experience. Because of its complex cutting and binding, Sniper is still being bound by the printer, but is available in pre-sales now from the publisher here and my gallery here. It is an edition run of 450, plus 40 Special Edition books. The Special Edition includes a small handmade print— there are eight unique photograph prints, numbering five each— and will be in a slip cover case. There are two cover options, one in yellow (seen above), the other in red. The book (and some of my gallery prints) will be traveling to the UK for Photo London, and later to Amsterdam for UNSEEN next month. Otherwise, they can be pre-ordered now and will be available for shipment at the end of September. I will have a limited number of copies available for sale as well.
Amoeba: Like Sniper, I’ve discussed the making of Amoeba in previous newsletters. When I was formulating the project with the publisher, Katoh-san, we decided we would make something with a long text in addition to the photographs, so that the book’s narrative could be told in both words and images. In a tradition beautifully rendered by Araki, Lee Freelander, and others, it’s the story of my marriage to Ariko, our origins and how our life evolved from adventure and art into parenthood and social responsibility. It’s a love story, as well as a meditation on aging and evolving together, as the photos of her are taken from when we met in her late 20s through 2020, when she was 45 years old.
I paired photographs of her with self-portraits of myself in shadows and reflections, from our life at home in Tokyo and Kyoto and from our travels: images from Africa, Iceland, Honolulu and elsewhere. It’s a kind of a visual memoir, in which text and images interact, complementing one another so that a story is more finely told. Amoeba is my interpretation of the photo book as love story memoir.
While most photo books are offset printed, the photographs in Amoeba were done with a Risograph machine. The colors used range from fluorescent pink to aqua blue, yellow, black burgundy red, and classic reds and blues. It’s an incredibly laborious process, as the publisher explores which mixture of colors best represent those from the darkroom prints. Moreover, the ink is very slow to dry, so it’s difficult to mass print papers for the book. Throughout they have to be very careful to avoid ink stains. If you’re familiar with silkscreening, it’s based on the same principles. The whole operation requires a very attentive procedure.
Amoeba has a print run of 300 copies and I spent a week producing a small handmade print for each and every book, attached to the back inside cover. And the publisher decided that the finishing touch would be that the bookbinding be completely manual. Binding each book by hand added to the production time, which is why we were all overly optimistic when I first announced Amoeba would be ready in the early spring. Because of the labor-intensive quality of the work, the price for one copy will be ¥5000 (plus postage, which will probably be approximately ¥800 if I’m posting internationally). I’m ordering fifty copies from the publisher, and have thirty already reserved as pre-orders. If you think you might want to purchase a signed edition from me, please let me know and I will add your name to the list.
Solo Show at Santa Barbara: It’s still happening for a little while longer. It’s at the Gone Residency adjacent to Grey Space Gallery. The show presents 31 framed color darkroom prints from my new book, Sniper. I heard from the curator, Avi Gitler, that it was a very nice opening, . I do wish I’d been able to attend and certainly would have, if not for onerous Covid quarantine regulations returning to Japan.
There are more images of the show as well as a short video of my process made three years ago by old pal Jimmy Pham here. If you go, you won’t just see my photography, but beautiful paintings as well by Esteban Ocampo-Giraldo, Juan De La Rica, George Boorujy, and Rachel Ostrow, and there is an artist-in-residency, the painters and muralists, Boy Kong and Kirza Lopez. If you are able to make it to the exhibition, say hi to Avi, as he is an enthusiastic collector and curator, with many a good story.
Tales of the Print: In the spring of 2010, I visited Yakushima, joining Ariko, her sister, Misa, and her mother, Masako, for a week exploring the tropical island that was the inspiration for Miyazaki’s Princess Mononoke. Yakushima Island has a mostly rural population and most of its tropical forest remains intact. The highlight of the trip was the twelve-hour hike to the Jōmon Sugi, one of the world’s oldest cedar trees, estimated to be anywhere between 2000 and 7000 years old. The cedar is like a pilgrimage site, and hikers, upon arriving at the tree, tend to bask in its shadow. Many pray, as to be near a living thing with such longevity is to feel closer to God. What’s truly lovely about it is that it’s so deep in the forest that there’s no possibility of commercialization. There is just the trail and the tree, and either you brought enough to eat and drink on the very long walk or you didn’t.
I took this photograph en route on the hike with a Diana f+ toy camera. It was mid-morning, and a bit cloudy and when I scanned the negative, I did minimal editing. My first attempt of the scene when I began color darkroom printing in 2013 was pretty much the same. But in the last few years I really began to view negatives as blueprints with unlimited potential for the imagination and color printing as a means to subvert or create new realities. I decided that the best way to express the properties of the photograph was through a vivid purple-pink and through experimentation with test paper was able to come upon this color.
This photograph is in my new book, The Sniper Paused So He Could Wipe His Brow, and is one of eight prints (in sets of five) in the Special Edition Box Set of the book, available for sale with my publisher and gallery.
Normally, I write about “a best loved photo book” and some reflections on what I’ve been reading lately, but according to Substack I’ve reached my “email length limit,” precluding inclusion of the pictures I took of The Photographs of Ron Gallela, so I’ll post that next time. And sadly, I’ve not read nearly as much as I’ve liked lately, caught up as I am streaming the chaos of our collective moment. I can’t remember the last time it’s been so difficult to disengage from the world into the realm of books. In spite of nearly daily habits of meditation and yoga, my thoughts can feel disconnected and lacking in clarity. I’m quite sure this is a passing phase, but I will need to establish stricter protocols for news consumption so that I have not only more time for books, but, more importantly, better mental clarity in other areas in my life.
These pesky distractions being so ubiquitous, I’m all the more grateful for your reading and continued support. Stay strong, stay engaged, stay in love.