shashasha

French photographer Maki’s photobook Guyu, published by the French Timeshow Press, showcases the artist’s contrast-rich black-and-white street photography. The subjects range from streets in Shinjuku to hectic nude shots and views of trees. The photobook features an essay by Clement Paradis in French and English.

"Guyu in japanese, means “allegory”. For Maki, the figure of speech is a photographic category. At the core of his photography practice, lies the question of re-presentation, of the relationship to space... The involvement of known elements in new sets - or the opposite. During his travels in Japan of the past 15 years, Maki stayed tireless, circulating through metropolitan cities, from island to island, with a rear base in Tokyo, Shinjuku district - a point of "eternal return" for the Japanese photographers. […]
Maki's photography is made of figures, and figures of speech, forming a kind of social novel of the Japanese territory. Here, photography is definitely not a transparent language: the photographer's work gives it its thickness, which is not that of an icon but that of the "demon of analogy," a skillful weaving between the allegorical mental world and the objective world around us. […]
That is what unfolds over the double pages of Guyu, this dense atmosphere of Japanese cities where sometimes the world seems to curve around the individual in a movement whose end can only be photography. Maki's approach starts with a non-resistance to the experience. It shows in Guyu, page after page, and so the energy of the perfectly controlled photographic grain ends up as a dark matter in the galaxy of Japanese cities.

— from the publisher’s statement