Next up with his selection for Photobooks of 2015 is Maki:-
1. Modoru Okinawa by Keizo Kitajima (Gomma books)
1975. Okinawa, Japan. The Vietnam War has just ended.
Koza City is where the Kadena U.S. Air Force base is located.
Keizo Kitajima visits this city regularly during those years and he executes a vital work, a crucial and important piece of documentary photography.
2. Record N° 28 by Daido Moriyama (Akio Nagasawa)
With a total of 192 pages, this volume of “Record” is the most massive edition and one of the most successful… It compiles a collection of photographs taken within various locations in Taiwan in 2014. Traveling for more than 400km, between the cities Tainan, Keelung, Chiayi, Taipei and Taichung, Moriyama photographed people, landscapes and areas from his journey.
3. Haru Ranman by Clément Paradis (Timeshow Press)
Haru Ranman is a conceptual book – two covers, two stories, two aesthetics. Pick the book on the blue side and you’ll turn into “Le Poinçonneur d’Hibiya”, and visit the life underground. Turn the book on the red side and you’ll find yourself upstairs, in the digital sensuality of downtown Tokyo. It’s up to you to decide where it all starts and ends.
Using the last printing techniques (half of the book is printed in white on blue paper – a first!), Clément Paradis takes us on a claustrophobic but exhilarating ride in the Tokyo Spring, where the city and its denizens are both everywhere and unreachable, and where obsession, laughter, and loneliness mix on the cold sensors of the Japanese cameras.
4. A port Town Elegy (reprinted new edition) by Mao Ishikawa (Zen Foto Gallery)
It was in 1983 when I got divorced at the age of 30. Since I was not confident that I could live as photographer with a daughter, I decided to run a bar in Okinawa to make some steady money. Most of the guests were men, including port workers and fishermen. Near there, I found a little old house where a man was living alone after his wife and kids had left. Some men always gathered in the house, drinking all day, sometimes fighting to -– making a man’s world. Nobody approached this house where scary-looking guys got together, but my boyfriend visited there every day. I also went with him, out of curiosity, to the house and started to shoot pictures of those men. Even when they started to fight and beat each other up, I just kept shooting silently – Mao Ishikawa.
5. Désordres by Antoine D’Agata (Editions Voies Off)
Back in 1996 Antoine D’Agata is not a famous photographer. He was invited in the first edition of Voies Off photo festival in Arles (France) to introduce his photo works Mala Noche. 20 years after to celebrate his 20th anniversary Voies Off publish a new book by Antoine D’Agata.
The real novelty of this book is in the overall approach of the documentary practice of the author, in the presence of 27 texts (in french), written by Antoine D’Agata between 1995 and 2015, constituting an aspect of the photographic practice, and confronts it to a constant reflection.
This book can be considered as a well made retrospective of his works and writings since 1996.
6. Now I wanna be your dog by Morten Andersen (Média Immédiat)
Portraits of Antoine d’Agata by Morten Andersen.
In the beginning of the 90’s Morten Andersen was student at the ICP (International Center of Photography) in New York together with his friend Antoine D’Agata.
The photographer exhumed for this mini book the portraits he made of Antoine during their student years in the Big Apple. Unpublished to date, these photos capture the essence of the young artist through scenes in apartments, bars and streets of New York showing the humor, candor, but also the impertinence, madness and distress of who would become 25 years later one of the leading photographers in contemporary photography… Morten Andersen takes us in this book into the universe of Antoine D’Agata as much as in his own, and in the field of youth and memory of time through the photographic act…
7. Adrenamix by Ryuichi Ishikawa (Akaaka)
Loneliness I feel with my ass
before the overflowing foam soaks into the earth
Meandering eyeballs scattered are unable
to find a river to dive into
in a weird land so closed
that one cannot even get lost in it
– Ryuichi Ishikawa
A selection of books from the Photobooks of 2015 feature can be purchased here.
Maki is a photographer born and currently living in Marseille (France). He studied photography in the beginning of the 80′s. He was the founding member of the collective of european photographers SMOKE. He is also publisher of the mini photobooks collection MÉDIA IMMÉDIAT and is working since some years on his photographic series about Japan called “Japan Somewhere”.
