Look inside
The public profile of the Japanese photography book has boomed in the 2000s, from near-complete obscurity to great desirability. And not only for the aficionados. Photobooks that once were entirely unknown outside Japan (except to a few well-informed scholars and collectors) have become highly collectible. And yet the photobook has been central to the development of Japanese photography, particularly in its postwar phase. To sketch the stages of this boom: 1999's Fotografia Publica included just one Japanese photobook, Kiyoishi Koishi's Early Summer Nerves of 1937, plus two photo magazines from the 1930s, Nippon and Koga; Andrew Roth's The Book of 101 Books (2001) listed four seminal titles by Hosoe, Kawada, Araki and Moriyama; but it was not until 2004, with the first volume of Martin Parr and Gerry Badger's indispensable The Photobook: A History, that it began to be clear what a rich body of work awaited excavation.
The public profile of the Japanese photography book has boomed in the 2000s, from near-complete obscurity to great desirability. And not only for the aficionados. Photobooks that once were entirely unknown outside Japan (except to a few well-informed scholars and collectors) have become highly collectible. And yet the photobook has been central to the development of Japanese photography, particularly in its postwar phase. To sketch the stages of this boom: 1999's Fotografia Publica included just one Japanese photobook, Kiyoishi Koishi's Early Summer Nerves of 1937, plus two photo magazines from the 1930s, Nippon and Koga; Andrew Roth's The Book of 101 Books (2001) listed four seminal titles by Hosoe, Kawada, Araki and Moriyama; but it was not until 2004, with the first volume of Martin Parr and Gerry Badger's indispensable The Photobook: A History, that it began to be clear what a rich body of work awaited excavation.