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Together with “White” and “Between the Sea and the Mountain”, “Sakura” forms one of the main representative series of Risaku Suzuki’s 20 year long body of work.

In “Sakura”, Suzuki focuses on the cherry blossom, the one flower most familiar with his Japanese audience and simultaneously one of the most trite and ordinary photographic motifs available. Suzuki’s choice to focus on the cherry blossoms may well be a decision to sharpen his own artistic sensibilities.

The photobook, published by Edition Nord, is a light, bright, beautiful examination of the cherry flower, from both a more direct, earnest approach and - with some of the photos completely taken over by blurred out close-ups - in a self-aware, meta-commentary kind of manner. Most of the works in the book have been photographed in 2016, with additional photographs shot at later dates.