Concrete Octopus.

Photographs by Osamu Kanemura. Text by Chris Fujiwara. Edited by José Pedro Cortes, André Príncipe, and Yoko Sawada.

Pierre von Kleist Editions and Osiris (Tokyo), Lisbon, Portugal, 2017. English & Japanese, 88 pp., black-and-white illustrations, 7½x11¾".

Selected as Book of the Week by Laura M. André

Concrete Octopus takes off where Kanemura´s 2002 acclaimed Spider's Strategy left off. For the first time, Osiris and Pierre von Kleist team up to show Kanemura's new work done between 2011 and 2013. The cult Japanese photographer proves to be in great shape. Includes a text by Chris Fujiwara, a film critic living in Tokyo.

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

Osamu Kanemura (b.1964) is a photographer born and based in Tokyo. He has been photographing the citiscapes in his solid monochromes. Since 1992, he has had more than twenty solo exhibitions in Tokyo, New York and other cities. His works have been featured in many exhibitions, including the 1996 'New Photography 12,' The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the 1997 'Absolute Landscape,' Yokohama Museum of Art, the 2004 Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie d’Arles, and the 2006 Venice Architecture Biennale. His 2002 photobook, Spider's Strategy is widely known as his major publication.

His photographs are in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography, as well as in other public and private collections. He received the New Photographer Prize from the Photographic Society of Japan in 1997, the Ken Domon Prize in 2000, and the Ina Nobuo prize in 2014.

Ordering Information

This item is currently unavailable from photo-eye, Amazon and Amazon Marketplace.

Other recent books by Osamu Kanemura

Our customers who bought this also purchased

Masonry OFF