Empty Sky

Koji Otsuka
Empty Sky

Photographs: Koji Otsuka

Publisher: Sokyusha

94 pages

Year: 2018

Price: 45 €

Comments: Hardcover, 24,3 x 26 cm, colors photographs. Text in English and Japanese. Design by Katsuya Kato.

Koji Otsuka’s second photobook is a nihilistic look at the emptiness within a city filled to the brim with people and objects. The high-contrast streetsnaps were taken in and around Tokyo in the mid 2000s and open our eyes to Otsuka’s reality.

“Just outside the window of this room in which I find myself, there’s the Japanese character for sky. But depending how you read it, it can also mean different things. ‘Air’ or ‘space’. ‘Emptiness’ or ‘the void’. It seemed to try and peer at me over here, from the other side of the wall. It seemed to ask me questions.” (from the afterword)