Böcker utgivna av Osiris

"Dawn in Spring" brings back the earliest works of Japanese photographer Asako Narahashi. Originally shot in 1989, a decisive period not only for the then-unknown artist, Narahashi exhibited the images from her "Dawn in Spring" series four separate times throughout the year. Including previously unshown images, this book represents the first time her series is made available in print. After taking part in Daido Moriyama's "FotoSession" workshop in the mid-80s, 1989 was the year her time as a university student would end. With an undecided future ahead of her, Narahashi travelled through Japan - Kumamoto, Miyakejima, Hakata, Yokohama, Hachinohe, Yuzawa, Tokyo... - and inadvertently laid the foundation for her photographic career. Despite the long time between these photographs and her breakthrough in the latter half of the 90s, the black-and-white images in "Dawn of Spring" already reveal the acute sensibilities of this exceptional artist.

"1/1" is Takashi Yasumura's fourth photographic series which follows "Domestic Scandals," "Nature Tracing" and "If This is a Planet". Yasumura commenced this series in 2008, and continued shooting throughout Japan until 2015. While Yasumura has occasionally shown this work in solo and group exhibitions, this collection compiles together one hundred and eleven works, including many of which have never been shown before.

The first monograph of the Japanese artist, Takashi Yasumura, a 1999 grand prize winner of Canon's "New Cosmos of Photography."With texts in Japanese and English: "The Calm Surfaces of Scandal" by Martin Jaeggi; "Friendship with the World of Things" by Akihito Yasumi; and "Family Home, or the Stage of Representation" by Shino Kuraishi.

In his photobook "Holy Onion", Japanese photographer Motoyuki Daifu concentrates on his mother, photographed while she peels an onion in the family's kitchen (both mother and kitchen are familiar to us from Daifu's previous works portraying his family's life). In 35 continuous photographs, Daifu captures his mother peeling onions, frame by frame. The photographs are taken only moments apart, as Daifu's mother cuts into the onion in her hand, scratches her nose, look at the camera, back at the onion, wipe her eyes. The book's accordion design, with some images separated by white pages, others grouped together, adds to the continuous nature of the sequence. As the images progress, small details in the setting change, and by the end of the book, the plate with onion peels is again empty, the process ready to start all over again. With "Holy Onion", Daifu pays close attention to the intricacies of mundane tasks and accentuates the beauty within (almost automatic) everyday routines. The book also features an essay by Chris Fujiwara (in English).

A leg fixed in plaster ("gips" in Japanese) means a limitation to everyday life that will last for several weeks. Japanese photographer Asako Narahashi had an exhibition planned for the following month when she broke her left pinky toe and had her leg covered in a cast in April of 1991. Not yet having taken enough photographs to cover the walls of the gallery, she decided to document her life with her leg in plaster. "[T]he reason I didn't want to look back on these photos until now was also because I didn't want to be reunited with myself as I appear in them. Memory is a vague thing, recalling only the good things or forgetting and rearranging things as is convenient. Reunions with one's younger self are bitter-sweet and sour. [...]Though I had reviewed the contact prints carefully at the time, when I've looked back over them in the intervening twenty-five-plus years, I've seen things I didn't think of before, and things that I hadn't noticed back then look newly striking or charming now. On the other hand, some shots that I selected before are embarrassing, and I probably wouldn't choose them now. "- from Asako Narahashi's afterword