With Japanese photography, I have had to change how I look at it from the surface level toward something much more intricate in my understanding of how Japanese artists approach the camera. When I first started looking into the national camera of Japan, the obvious references were already a known quantity to me. Classic big-name black-and-white photographers such as Sugimoto, Suda, Ueda, Fukase, Nishimura, Tomatsu, Ishiuchi, Tomatsu, Kawada, Hosoe, Domon, Naitō, and others established in the annals of the medium. Other more recent voices such as Naoya Hatekayama, Makiko Hara, Sakiko Nomura, Tokyo Rumando, Daisuke Yokota, Hiromix, Asako Narahashi, Hideko Tonomura, and Rinko Kawauchi are also known entities. And yet, many gifted image-makers are coming out of Japan.

From that point, I worked on leaning into Japanese photography with some open-mindedness for the nation’s lesser-known but equally essential artists. Artists like Koji Onaka, Masafumi Sanai, Motoyuki Daifu, Taka Mayumi, Yoshihiko Ueda, Risaku Suzuki, Mayumi Hosokura, Umihara Chikara, Fumitsugu Takedo, Hiro Tanaka, Jin Ohashi, Hiroki, Koji Kitagawa, Hiroki Matsui, and Osamu Kanemura, among others. There is still much investigation to do. Japanese photobooks are a pandora’s box in many ways. You can spend a very long time investigating various themes, and artists tend to work feverishly for periods, sometimes short, and sometimes over many years. With the younger generation, there is a push to make an impression with a flurry of activity. We have seen this with the proliferation of Daisuke Yokota titles until the point of exhaustion.

More recently, Taka Mayumi has quickly burst onto the scene, producing several excellent books. In the age of social media, this tactic is tricky to keep up with, but it does increase the ability for the East and West to see each other’s work. There are many potential book collectors for the Japanese bookmaker, and oftentimes, collectors and enthusiasts find out about titles when it is slightly too late. The book has sold out, leading to secondhand price hikes and frustration of not seeing the material. Of course, there are more and more outlets that cater to new books, such as Shashasha and Twelve Books, that one can follow to see new titles as they are produced, and it does pay to watch if you find yourself deep in the rabbit hole of Japanese photobooks.

Truth be told, the Japanese field of production is vast and inspiring. One of the significant tendencies in its output is the lack of relying on narrative to fulfill the production order. Instead, and this has been the case since the late 1960s (arguably 1970 forward), a deep subjectivity is concerned with producing photobooks. The art of the photograph, the single picture, is often valued over its competency in a sequence of narrative-based bookmaking, which is slightly anathema to how books are produced (conservatively) in the West. This allows the Japanese artist to shoot more and frees the viewer to invest in the work on multiple levels. We are told less what to think, and the infantilizing nature of Western narration often overreaches and singes the dreams of the viewer to project, interpret, and enjoy the image itself. Of course, there are exceptions on both sides. One can invoke the looseness of Eggleston quite quickly or refer to any number of Japanese photographers like Lieko Shiga whose books, at their fundament, have a rough concept and a rigor to production that suggests something based less on observation that that of subject phenomenon.

With Kentaro Kumon’s Smoke and Steam (COO Books, 2024), the lyrical license found in the artist’s daily observational photographs is condensed into a diminutive yet elegant 400-page book, which suggests an all-encompassing look at how the artist produces images. In this case, the pictures are made from an Olympus Pen Ft camera, a lightweight and compact 35mm camera that works well for having it on you wherever you travel, allowing more photographs to be made and chances to be taken. A photographer’s gear will often dictate how much work is produced and when. Having a small camera on your person pays to make images as you encounter them, which is much more complicated with a medium format or SLR. Kumon’s camera choice reflects a family tie as his father used the same camera before him. He was pleasantly surprised to find a box of his photographs, an inter-generational synergy thus evolved.

In a closet in my parents’ home, I found old family pictures and boxes of photos and slides my father had once taken with the same camera I use now. It was nice to learn that he had an interest that brought him joy. Looking through his photos, I noticed that the things he had captured through the viewfinder were strangely similar to my photos taken with the same camera. I had been borrowing my father’s eyes for the past year.

My parents have moved out and started living in a new apartment nearby. While it was sad having to say goodbye to our family home, I enjoyed bringing them gifts and souvenirs from my travels. For now, everything’s good.

My father still spends his days sitting by the window looking out. The windows in the new apartment aren’t as large, and there’s no bridge stretching out into the sea either. All that’s left to see in the window now is the sky.- KK

Kentaro’s photographs have a pleasant, natural order to them. Though there are many images in the book, I keep returning to the pictures of nature, green interspersing the pages along with his penchant, like Hiroki Matsui for golden hour light. It paints his world into a forest between trunk and leaves, green and brown, respectively. There are also more urban scenes in the work, or at least architectural images that present as urban. One gets the sense that most of the pictures are taken in mid- to small-sized cities and towns, where the overwhelming nature of a city like Tokyo is less of a concern than the parks of Nara.

And yes, smoke and steam do make an appearance. With the cover image, one expects a book reflecting post-industrial landscapes or ecology as the topic. In many ways, it is, but the reality of the world crafted in the book is broader, though the billowing smoke stacks present a recurring theme. I read them as anxious images, though I am positive they are observed phenomena. The post-industrial gloaming is temporary, and we return to images that are more sedate and rounded and invoke, for lack of better terms, a joy in the world and a joy in taking its portrait. This is one of several books the artist was kind enough to send me, and I will review the others soon. It is interesting to see a thick book of Kumon’s images when his previous books feel slightly more specific, ordered by place. I highly recommend all of his books. There is something at peace in them, despite the landscape being dotted with potential signifiers of loss and syrupy melancholia. Highly Recommended.