Photographier pour publier : les livres de photographies de Homma Takashi, Kawauchi Rinko, Sanai Masafumi et Yamamoto Masao

摘要

Since the beginning of their artistic recognition in the 1990s, Japanese photographers Homma Takashi (born in 1962), Kawauchi Rinko (1972-), Sanai Masafumi (1968-) and Yamamoto Masao (1957-) have published numerous photobooks. By favouring the book over the exhibition to display their works, they turned it into a space where Western reflections and traditional Japanese models intersect, especially aesthetic and literary ones. The four photographers all take their inspiration from their own environment, but similarities can also be observed in the photographic subjects, production processes and page settings.In an expanded study of the history of photobooks in Japan, the exemplary approaches of these four artists will enable to develop and to analyse how photography publishing practices have fed – and are still feeding – the renewal of Japanese contemporary photography. Using the book (an object that can be easily carried, handled and mechanically reproduced) makes it necessary to wonder about the circulation and the critical reception of the artists’ work, both in Japan and abroad. Indeed, the book has to be considered as an artistic medium that materialises the relationships between the Far East and the West.