shashasha

How can we, when composing a photo book, prevent the order of pictures from suggesting any stories or intentions behind it? In what structure can a book present each image as just merely one of those equivalently different images it contains?

This time, we chose to give a different photograph order to each copy of the book, so that all the copies, with no same compositions, are in fact different books while sharing the same front cover. Each “book,” as a result, has a unique sequence and therefore gives a different impression to the reader.

Normally, a photo book is designed to lead the reader to a certain feel and also to convey the photographer’s intent. However, we decided not to take this direction, venturing on what this would make possible and visible, because we thought that this way, each photograph selected for this book could go beyond our ideas when perceived by the viewer.

What Itami wants to present is nothing more than the visual elements incorporated in the photographic image. His photographs are an accumulation of images that were in front of his camera. We conceived the structure of this book so that it would resonate with the photographer’s attitude toward photographing. This photo book, titled “photocopy,” was created to make the act of viewing photographs as simple as possible, enabling us to look at each image attentively.
— statement by the publisher

“Rather than a photobook where two images are visible at once, this book was created to show only one single photograph at a time. What is the experience of seeing a single photograph? The human field of view is large: when you look at a photographic image, you look at the image but also at everything that surrounds it. I have thought about looking at a single image without becoming too conscious of other things that enter the eye. As a result, the pages in this photobook are turned at the top left corner. You can look through the entire photobook with full concentration, without changing the position of your head or your line of sight. I had no particular intentions for the order of the images, and so the photographs in each of the 1000 copies of this photobook are in a different order.”
— from the artist's statement