Concrete octopus

Osamu Kanemura
Concrete octopus

Photographs: Osamu Kanemura

Text: Chris Fujiwara

Publisher: Pierre von Kleist

88 pages

Year: 2017

Comments: Hardcover, 300 x 189 mm. First edition, 2017. Black & white photographs. Edited by José Pedro Cortes, André Príncipe and Yoko Sawada.

It would be strange and misleading, though obviously not wholly inaccurate, to call these photographs “images of the Japan of the present time.” Though they might perhaps have much to say to the social historian, their documentary function is circumscribed by the interest in exploring a visual universe too disunited and incomplete to be recognizable as a cultural or historical form. In these images, the world presents itself with great purity and without provocation or seduction, as though poised in the interval before the repetition of an already forgotten catastrophe.

Chris Fujiwara