“Photography” is an 800-page anthology compiled from 24 self-published books from 2015 to 2021, as well as previously unpublished works. Faces captured from fixed-point videos, scanned works from a year’s worth of supermarket flyers, a single pharmacy flyer processed into dozens of images, guinea pigs, plants in a residential neighborhood, hangers in Utrecht, nutritional packages for cats and dogs, yukata, birds, pixels, mouflon, and works that scans only light with the image of moonlight. The plants especially look perfect. I often get inspiration for my work from my daily life, and it is an impulsive desire. It is essential to have a dialogue with myself about what I should or should not make a work about now. Trying to stay away from thoughts and stories as much as possible, and using different styles is a more important choice for me than being photographic.
Nicolas Giraud said: “These plentiful, dense sequences bear witness to an perpetually renewed process, tirelessly recapturing what is in front of his eyes, trying to make his way through what is visible. Kitagawa does not grant us access to the world, he confronts us with its opacity, in hopes of seeing in every way possible, at the risk of dissolving the image… Bringing together this work in a single volume makes it possible to traverse this obsessive exploration of the visible, to grasp the movement driving Koji Kitagawa. The book reveals the scope of his ambition, the way in which he grows attached to poor objects yet brings them to incandescence. A face, a newspaper page, a plant, constitute object-worlds that the photographer explores to the fullest.”
Published by Area Books
