RINKO KAWAUCHI | Illuminance

First edition. First printing.

Within these pages, you’ll find 130 images—an exquisite mosaic of life’s quiet poetry. Kawauchi’s palette is finely honed, her gaze keenly observant, a master of paring and sequencing images. She captures quotidian details—the sheen of hair against a cotton t-shirt, the refraction of light through a water droplet —infusing them with a dream-like intensity.

Selected by Parr and Badger for "The Photobook: A History Volume III". Martin Parr and Gerry Badger write :

"Rinko Kawauchi's photography has always taken us out of the everyday material world into one that evokes memory or dreams. The images in Illuminance span fifteen years of work, but Kawauchi is a book-maker, and the essence of her work lies in the way in which she takes disparate images and welds them into a visual narrative with a certain mood. Like many photographers, she is involved in exploring the poetry of the commonplace, but her poetic flights perhaps take her further into the ether than most."
(p. 276)

Light wear or bumping to edges and corners of cover. Corners of first two pages have minimal wear. Rest of pages are clean and crisp. Very good condition.

Soft linen covered boards with reflective dot lettering and adhered color image on front and back. Folded, single-side printed pages. (unpaginated) Boards and binding designed to be free at front hinge. 
6 page essay "Weightless Light" by David Chandler.

"In 2001, Rinko Kawauchi launched her career with the simultaneous publication of three astonishing photobooks--Utatane, Hanabi and Hanako--firmly establishing herself as one of the most innovative newcomers to contemporary photography, not just in Japan, but across the globe. In the years that followed, she published other notable monographs, including Aila (2004), The Eyes, the Ear (2005) and Semear (2007). And now, ten years after her precipitous entry onto the international stage, Aperture has published Illuminance, the latest volume of Kawauchi's work and the first to be published outside of Japan. Kawauchi's photography has frequently been lauded for its nuanced palette and offhand compositional mastery, as well as its ability to incite wonder via careful attention to tiny gestures and the incidental details of her everyday environment. As Sean O'Hagan, writing in The Guardian in 2006, noted, "there is always some glimmer of hope and humanity, some sense of wonder at work in the rendering of the intimate and fragile." In Illuminance, Kawauchi continues her exploration of the extraordinary in the mundane, drawn to the fundamental cycles of life and the seemingly inadvertent, fractal-like organization of the natural world into formal patterns. Gorgeously produced as a clothbound volume with Japanese binding, this impressive compilation of previously unpublished images--which garnered Kawauchi a nomination for the Deutsche Börse Prize--is proof of her unique sensibility and ongoing appeal to lovers of photography." - from the publisher

8.6 x 11.25 inches