Rinko Kawauchi: Illuminance: The Tenth Anniversary Edition

Description

Ten years after publishing Illuminance in 2011, Aperture is delighted to bring this beloved book back into print, retaining Rinko Kawauchi's original sequence and signature melding of keenly observed gestures, quotidian detail, and a finely honed palette. On the book's original release, Alec Soth declared Illuminance "an exquisitely produced monograph [that] should make Rinko a household name." An expanded edition with additional texts by curator David Chandler; philosopher Masatake Shinohara; and Aperture's creative director, Lesley A. Martin, this reissue contributes new context to and perspective on Kawauchi's influential work. Extraordinarily poetic, brimming with imagination and sensibility, and following international acclaim, this exquisite ten-year anniversary edition will entice lovers of photography once again.

Rinko Kawauchi (born in Shiga, Japan, 1972) studied graphic design and photography at Seian University of Art and Design, Otsu, Japan. She has published over twenty-five books of her work, including Hanako, Utatane, and Hanabi, a trio of "first books" published simultaneously in 2001. Her work is collected and exhibited widely, and she won a Kimura Ihei Photography Award (2002) and International Center of Photography Infinity Award in Art (2009); and was shortlisted for the Deutsche Boerse Photography Prize (2012). Kawauchi lives and works in Tokyo. David Chandler is professor of photography at the University of Plymouth, UK. He has held various curatorial roles in museums and galleries, including at the National Portrait Gallery, London (1982-88) and Photographers' Gallery, London (1988-95); and as the director of Photoworks in Brighton, UK (1997-2010). Lesley A. Martin is creative director of Aperture Foundation and publisher of The PhotoBook Review. Masatake Shinohara is associate professor at Kyoto University, with a primary focus on contemporary philosophy, environmental humanities, architecture, and art. In 2016, he served as cocurator of the Japan Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale.

Rinko Kawauchi's Illuminance (Aperture) could be the year's most beautiful photo book With Illuminance, Kawauchi clarifies what Chandler calls her "spirit of accelerated wonder," summing up her considerable achievement while leaving it marvelously expansive and open-ended.--Vince Aletti"Photograph Magazine" (09/01/2011) Sensitively designed, Illuminance packs 144 photographs into its 163 French-fold pages. Yet by foregoing individual titles, captions, and page numbers one is left to really look at the images - their uncanny juxtapositions and accumulated connections. The cropped details, emotive over-exposures, and blurred movements actually perform a complex choreography, both in the camera and at the editing stage. For better or worse Japanese photobooks often go without essays to "contextualize" the work, yet here an appended essay by David Chandler notably cites what Kawauchi has referred to as the "constant present" to describe the elliptical sense of time permeating her enigmatic oeuvre.--Olivier Krischer"ArtAsiaPacific" (03/01/2012) Ten years on from her extraordinary first book, Aila, Kawauchi continues her journey into the heightened everyday. That same mix of intimacy and deceptively casual observation holds sway and the end results remain singularly beautiful.--Sean O'Hagan"The Guardian" (12/13/2011) The work of this Japanese photographer always looks better in book form, where, printed one per page and carefully sequenced, her images-delicate, intimate, reticent but never cryptic-an be absorbed slowly, and her tougher, more jolting photos can better deliver their punch. Illuminance gathers work from the last 15 years: a gangly spider; a hole in a rock, filled with water; a doll-like blossom, washed out by flash; a dead, bloodied deer by the side of the road. The book is cinematic in its steady buildup of images that create a mood, and then break it. This kind of thing is hard to sustain, but just when Kawauchi's approach to the poetic snapshot starts to look familiar, it takes a turn for the weird.--Stephen Maine"Art in America" (12/28/2011)