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An invaluable collection of the Japanese master’s rare color photographs

“Color – Somehow Familiar Places” offers readers a chance to see rare and previously unpublished color photographs by Kazuo Kitai, one of Japan’s most important photographers. Split into two chapters, the book opens with photographs taken in Japan in the 1970s, a time of fundamental change when “Japan threw off its old clothes and changed into new ones” and villages changed their appearance as much as the booming metropolises.

The second chapter consists of previously unpublished photographs taken during a photo assignment to Paris, France. Told to “just shoot the scenes you always do, children standing alone in the landscape” by his editor, Kitai spent two months in France (his first ever trip abroad) photographing people in the streets of Paris.

“When I look back at what monochrome and color photography meant to me, it feels as if black and white was the backroad of my photographic life, while color film was the grand boulevard, a road I walked on with a little hesitation, a little awkwardness.”
— from Kazuo Kitai’s afterword