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. 

The Problem is Photobook World is not Incestuous Enough

picture by Eamonn Doyle

So the blog will take a short break for Photobook Bristol and Vienna Photobook Festival, both of which I'm looking forward to immensely

In Vienna I'll be talking about narrative and my German Family Album. And at Photobook Bristol I'll be on a panel with

Eamonn Doyle, Kate Nolan and Kazuma Obara

talking about their first photobooks, all of which are massively interesting, engaging and challenging in different ways and have featured on this blog. As well as talking about what went right and what went wrong with their books (and what they would do differently), I think the question of why publish a book in the first place will come up.



picture by Kate Nolan

It's a question that came up on the Photobooks Facebook page where questions were asked on the business model of photobook-land, its incestuousness and all the other usual questions that we repeatedly ask of photobookery.

Well of course Photobook World can be small and it can be an echo-chamber. But it's not really that incestuous. If something is incestuous then the group is closed. If anything, Photobook World is not incestuous enough. I think that is what people are really objecting to.

Sure, you do get the same voices popping up again and again, and you get cliques, but at the same time if you have something that is good and you want to be seen or heard, it's relatively easy. It's a very open world. And the more open you are and the more engaged and engaging you are, the easier it gets. The world of the Photobook is far more open than the equivalent photographic worlds in academia, art or commerce.



picture by Kazuma Obara

Look at the end of year best lists and you'll see names that  were completely unknown a few years earlier. On the 2014 list from Photo-Eye. you had people like Laia Abril, Nicolo Degiorgis, Max Pinckers, Andy Rochelli, Alejandro Cartagena, Momo Okabe, Awoiska van der Molen. 

Go back a year to 2013 and you can see Pierre Liebaert, Lorenzo Vitturi, Oscar Monzon, Carlos Spottorno, Mike Brodie, Carolyn Drake and Paul Gaffney. 

Go to 2015 and 2016 and you'll get people on there who are still students now. Guaranteed.

These are people who have popped up out of nowhere (or almost nowhere) simply because they made something interesting, int he same way that Doyle, Nolan and Obara made something interesting. So you can make it 'big' in photobook world, make an interesting book. It's that simple. 

Of course very few people have heard of these people outside photobook land, but that's because if you're going spend £20 on a book of pictures, you have to be really interested in photography and books. Not many people are. There are other things to spend one's money on. 

But the openness I do not doubt. And if you worry about the world being limited by a handful of tastemakers, the answer is also simple. Write a blog, start a magazine, have an opinion and get busy. 

So sometimes when people talk about photobook world being too closed, I sometimes get the feeling they mean the opposite; that it's too open.

Whatever Evil is, it wasn't in that Room

picture from Kikuji Kawada's The Map

Last night Richard Flanagan won the Booker Prize with his novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North. It's the story that connects to  his father's experiences on the Thai-Burma Railway - as Flanagan says "Between 100,000 and 200,000 died. More than died at Hiroshima. More corpses than there are words in my novel."

Flanagan worked for 12 years to tell this story. He told it as a love story because he says that while war stories dark about death, war also illuminates love which is the greatest expression of hope. It's what we live for.

And because it's what we live for, it's what we want to read about. Flanagan has every reason to be self-indulgent and wallow in his father's misery, but it seems like he's translating the story for readership. He's reaching out, he's editing, he's adapting, he's simplifying, he's making it a story that has been written for the reader. It's written on the reader's terms. I think an interesting question here is how often do photographers do this?; go out to the reader and sacrifice their self-indulgence to tell the story well? How often do they do this, how often don't they do this?

I haven't read the book, I only read an excerpt that appeared in the Guardian at the Weekend. All six of the books were highlighted, but for me, Flanagan's (along with Ali Smith's) were the ones that stood out. Here's an excerpt.

I went to Japan. There I searched and found several guards who had worked on the Death Railway. Five minutes before meeting with one guard I realised he was the man who had been the Ivan the Terrible of my father's camp, the man the Australians called the Lizard. Sentenced to death for war crimes after the war, the Lizard later had his death sentence commuted to life imprisonment, and then was released in a general amnesty in 1956. He is the only man I ever heard my father – a gentle, peaceful man – talk of with violent intent.

The meeting was in the offices of a taxi company in suburban Tokyo. Lee Hak Rae, as he is now, was a gracious old man. Near the end of our meeting, I asked him to slap me. Violent face slapping – known as binta– was the immediate form of punishment in the camps, doled out frequently and viciously. On the third blow, the taxi office began to shake and toss violently, like a dinghy in a wild sea.

In one of those coincidences in which reality delights but fiction, for fear of being unrealistic, never permits, a 7.3 Richter scale earthquake had hit Tokyo. For half a minute I saw the Lizard frightened. I saw too that wherever evil is, it wasn't in that shuddering room with that old man and me.

I haven't read the book yet, I'm just going on the 500 words or so he wrote for the Guardian - but if he can make the story interesting, and magical, in 500 words, then I'll bet the book is interesting too. From the quote above it seems to me that he's humanising the inhuman, and that's what makes the story interesting. It gives it another dimension that goes beyond the usual heads or tails, good and evil dialogue. It's why Studio Ghibli is better than Disney, why Doris Lessing is more profound than Dan Brown.

And it's the same with good photography, or interesting photography. It gives three dimensions, it tells parts of the story that haven't been told before, it questions our assumptions, and it reaches out to the viewer on the viewer's terms. Certainly there's a place for self-referential streams of consciousness but it should only be a niche; a niche within a niche. 

I wrote last week about Silent Histories, Kazuma Obara's  excellent book on victim's of the American bombing in the Second World War. In addition to this, the book also questions Japanese society's attitude to the war and its victims. But I wondered at whether there are Japanese photobooks that focus exclusively on the role of the Japanese military in the Second World War, that look at people like Lee Hak Rae and what they did in the war and how they feel now. There are plenty of photobooks made at the time that wondered at the glory of the Japanese Imperial Army, but ones that wonder at the brutality, that question Japan's role in Asia in the 1930s and 1940s? I couldn't think of any and I ran it by a few people who know about Japanese photobooks and nobody could come up with anything. 

But that doesn't mean they don't exist or they won't exist. A few years ago when I taught English, I had a couple of Japanese students. The first was called Michiko. She was five foot two, with pigeon toes, chubby thighs and she wore Miffy socks. She was 30 but she looked 13. Her classmates were Swiss lawyers, Brazilian economists and Italian philosophers. At the start of the course, she was patronised to an extent I have never witnessed before. It was quite disgusting and I can honestly say I have wiped out the memory of everybody else in that class from my mind. But Michiko bore it all with good grace and at the end of her first week I found out why. Everybody gave a presentation on what they were studying. The Swiss talked about law, the  Brazilians about economics and it was all very good. I felt for Michiko who had chosen to go last. 

And so she came to the front and she started. "My name is Michiko and I am going to talk about the research I am doing for my PhD on the role of the Japanese Imperial Army in forced prostitution in Korea during the Second World War."

Oh my Giddy aunt. It was like something from a film where the tables are turned on the class bullies. After that, nobody ever patronised Michiko ever again. From that moment on, she was greeted with only politeness and respect by the other students. And a little fear. They were afraid of her and Michiko knew it. She knew it and she enjoyed it because she knew she was kinder, smarter and tougher than them. She didn't look it, but she was. 

"It took almost 1 day to make 2 books maximum by hand."

I posted yesterday about Kazuma Obara's excellent Silent Histories. It's a beautiful multi-layered book about the indiscriminate bombing of Japan during the Second World War, and the suffering of the civilians who lost their families, homes and limbs; suffering that dragged out into the post-war until the present day.

The screengrabs above aren't from the book but from Grave of the Fireflies, the tragic film that I think of an anime companion to the book. It's not, but I like to think it is.

The book includes pictures stuck into photo-corners, propaganda magazine facsimiles and a hand drawn and written narrative of events as told by one of his interviews.

Silent Histories was made in an edition of 45 (because that's when the war ended). It's a miserly figure, especially when the war ended in 1945. Why not make 1,945 copies?

That was asked and that was answered by Kazuma Obara on Twitter; "It took almost 1day to make 2 books maximum by my hand."

So the 45 books took up 22 days of his life. Mind-numbing and possibly quite frustrating days. I wrote a feature for the BJP on Photobooks a few years back and remember interviewing him about his publishing house, LBM, and how they made Conductors of the Moving World, a fundraiser for the Japanese earthquake and tsunami.

For the Conductors of the Moving World Book we taped the pictures in ourselves. Each book had 17 pictures taken from a selection of 90. The edit  was supposed to be random but it’s difficult to be random so we had a system for putting pictures in. We started and after 20 minutes I had dinked 3 pictures, bent the pages and hadn’t even finished one book. We had 500 books to do and I was going into meltdown. 

So it was all going to shit. But then their intern, Johnny Longfingers stepped into the room. He didn't dink pictures or smudge the glue or spread dirt on the pages. He did 5/10/100 books in an hour and before you know it they were flying off around the world.

But not everybody is Johnny Longfingers. So it doesn't always work that way. And unless you are really good with your hands and your cutting and pasting, it doesn't end up being that quick. That's why people pay printers huge sums to do it for them.

Kazuma Obara's Silent Histories

The shortlist for the Aperture First Photobook Prize is up and there are so many really good books in there (including old favourites like  Hidden Islam, Father Figure, War Porn and Euromaidan as well as great books like Epilogue, Red String and Andrea Botto's Number Book!). It's strange how the First Photobook Prize seems so much more interesting than the other Aperture book awards. It's also strange how small some of the editions are. And how concerned they are.

For example, Silent Histories came in a really small edition of 45. And it was expensive. But it sold out very quickly because it is an meticulously made photobook that combines contemporary, historical and archive photography with first hand accounts of what it's like to grow up with a war-inflicted disability in post-war Japan. It helps redefine events that happened a long time ago and it's a campaigning photobook. And it deals with a difficult subject; Japan and the Second World War. A that, despite all the fetishisation of the Japanese photobook, isn't talked about too much. I'm not sure why. 

So I wrote about Silent Histories for Emaho Magazine. This is what I said. 

Grave of the Fireflies is an anime film about the Second World War in Japan.  The main characters are a young boy and his younger sister. Their house is bombed, their mother is killed, they are shunned by their family and they go to live beyond the town in a life where the food runs out. It goes beyond miserable. I won’t give away the ending but it is one of the most tragic films I have ever seen, a film where the people who neglect and mistreat these children are almost as bad as the people who bombed them out of their house and home.

Silent Histories, a handmade book made in a sold-out edition of 45 by Kazuma Obara  shares many characteristics with Grave of the Fireflies. It’s a book that details the suffering endured by civilians who were injured in the American bombing of Japan. And it’s fantastic.

As an object it is beautiful. It comes bound in ox-blood and brown tweed, with a family portrait from 1930s Japan on the cover. But in the middle of the picture the face of the youngest family member is whited out. She’s missing. She’s hiding herself. This is a book about people who were destroyed by the war, who hide themselves away.

Open the book and the adventure begins. There are inserts; one class picture, four certificates and three replicas of a Japanese propaganda magazine dedicated to showing civilians how to defend themselves against aerial bombing.

The introduction to the book details the destruction to life and property endured: ‘The indiscriminate bombing by US forces during the Second World War massacred 330,000 and left 430,000 Japanese civilians injured.’

It highlights the resultant suffering of survivors who, ‘…have lived in the shadows, trying to hide their scars and avoid causing someone trouble by being visible, trying hard to cover their pain.’ And that is what the book is about, the Japanese people who have suffered because of the war.

The first subject is Teruko Anno. We see childhood snaps of her, class photos and the background she came from. But we also see waves of American bombers in the sky, their bombs dropping and a destroyed city. The message is clear. America did this. America is to blame.

We also see Teruko at the doctors, her suffering and pain still ongoing, and we hear her story, of how she was bombed in 1945, how she lost her leg, of the malnutrition that took her brother’s life and of the ‘…discrimination and prejudice against the wounds of war.’

Eiko Kobayashi tells her story through an illustrated insert. Her house was firebombed, she ran and was hit by shrapnel, she ended up in a hospital where she stayed for four days until her parents finally found her. It’s a story filled with the wanton violence of war, and what it does to the people who live under it. Kobayashi also suffered prejudice after the war ended. She was blamed for a defective product at the company she worked for; ‘”It’s because you employ people like her with bad legs.”’ And so she resigned, but from then on simply agreed with people who expressed their prejudice. ‘First and foremost, I had to prioritize making a living.’

The tales of suffering and prejudice continue. Mariko Fujiwara’s left leg was injured by a bomb two hours after she was born. She tells us how she went to a public washhouse when she was a child. In the evening to avoid other people. But one day a boy and a girl saw her injured leg. ‘”Mom, look, what a strange leg!” Their mother said, “If you do bad things, your legs become like that too!” When I heard that, I felt so sad.

There is a long list of classic Japanese photobooks that deal with how awful the Americans were in the Second World War, that examine the horrors of the blanket bombing of cities and the cruel devastation Hiroshima and Nagasaki. What’s worrisome is, in a country that has never been able to take responsibility for the crimes it committed during the Second World War, the lack of photobooks or photography that recognise the horrors Japan inflicted on the populations of other Asian countries.  There are Dutch books, Korean books and Chinese books, but Japanese? Japanese textbooks still skim over what Japan did in the Second World War. It would be nice if there photobooks that did otherwise.

But in a strange and very quiet way, Silent Histories is a step in the right direction. Though it addresses the indiscriminate cruelty of the American bombing campaign, it also addresses the failings of the Japanese government to adequately compensate the victims of the bombing. In a postscript, the photographer Obara writes how he went to attend a ‘…signature-collecting campaign for legislation supporting victims of the air attacks.’ But  the legislation hasn’t come, there is no support from a government which still provides compensation for ‘former military personnel, civilian employees and surviving relatives’.  The case is coming up to the Supreme Court and the next step is for the victims of the bombings to show the scars they have kept hidden for almost 70 years.

So ultimately the book is about making visible the scars and pain of war, of recognising the suffering that civilians go through everywhere, and ending all wars. It’s a dream, but it’s a good one, delivered in outstanding powerful fashion.