Best Handmade Small Editions that can be very expensive

 by Hiroshi Okamoto


What a category! I'll have to scratch my head for that one.

OK, here goes. I'll plump for Reminders Photography Stronghold who this year published Hiroshi Okamoto's fabulous Recruit (edition of 147 - at about £50 each), the beautiful Snowflake/Dog Man by Hajime Kimura (edition of .69 priced at just over a hundred of our glorious pounds - if you're on the continent and reading this in 2020 that's either 90 of your euros or possibly 200 depending on how things pan out) and many more..

by Hajime Kimura

It's run by Yumi Goto who is fabulously knowledgeable, dynamic and to the pointand she uses this to further the historical and the personal narrative through books, installations and general global influence.


At RPS, the overlap between the artist's book and the photobook is huge, but at the same time there is an elevation of personal stories (also see books like Red String) and a respect for the documentary tradition (as evidenced by Kazuma Obara's brilliant Silent Histories).

You're paying for something more than a photobook in other words (though I must say my eyes stung when I saw the price of the latest book. £375? That might be pushing it a little even if the edition is only 20.) and you're getting something more than a photobook. You're getting a beautiful book-work that is lovely to handle, to touch, to feel, to smell, oh baby, yeah, best stop there before I go all Austin Powers on you.

See if you can find the books here.

And read my interview with Yumi Goto for Photobook Bristol here. 

An Interview with Amak Mahmoodian

I've just finished posting on the Photobook Bristol Blog. Here here are some of the best posts from the blog.

The first is an interview with Amak Mahmoodian who talked at the festival and launched her beautiful, beautiful book Shenasnameh there over the weekend (and it's the first publication of Alejandro Acin and his IC Visual Labs).

I'm biased because I was involved in its making, but when Yumi Goto, Susan Meiselas and Andrea Copetti are buying your book, you know you're making something special, something that is personal, political and ultimately loving. And it works perfectly as a book.

An Interview with Amak Mahmoodian

I didn’t know it could be a book at first. I believe all good books start with some personal stories. It doesn’t matter if they are going to be successful or not, but each person must have a personal reason to create a book.

I started to collect the pictures with my friends and family and then friends of friends, in Tehran and then in other cities. At first I didn’t ask other women because I didn’t know if I had the right to ask other women.

As I collected them, I started to notice how different they were, especially in their look. It was really emotional for me, because in many cases I had their photograph but I had never met the woman. I would imagine her voice and her smile, her eyes, her life.  And then I would go and meet the woman and when I knocked at the door, it was like I was going to meet a photograph.

Sometimes I was really shocked because the woman was so different from the portrait I had imagined from the photograph. So each woman was different from another and then each woman was different from her photograph.

Read  the whole interview with Amak Mahmoodian here.

Buy Shenasnameh here.