Pierre von Kleist / Osiris, 2017. First edition.
Hardcover, 189 x 300 mm, 88 pp,, 40 b/w illustrations.
Photographs by Osamu Kanemura. Text by Chris Fujiwara (English / Japanese). Design by André Príncipe, José Pedro Cortes.
Concrete Octopus takes off where Kanemura´s 2002 acclaimed Spider's Strategy left. For the first time, Osiris and Pierre von Kleist team up to show Kanemura´s new work done between 2011 and 2013. The cult Japanese photographer proves to be in great shape. With a text by Chris Fujiwara, a film critic living in Tokyo.
'It would be strange and misleading, though obviously not wholly inaccurate, to call these photographs “images of the Japan of the present time.” Though they might perhaps have much to say to the social historian, their documentary function is circumscribed by the interest in exploring a visual universe too disunited and incomplete to be recognizable as a cultural or historical form. In these images, the world presents itself with great purity and without provocation or seduction, as though poised in the interval before the repetition of an already forgotten catastrophe.' Chris Fujiwara
Osamu Kanemura (b.1964) is a photographer born and based in Tokyo. Since 1992, he has had more than twenty solo exhibitions in Tokyo, New York and other cities. His works have been featured in many exhibitions, including the 1996 'New Photography 12,' The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the 1997 'Absolute Landscape,' Yokohama Museum of Art, the 2004 Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie d’Arles, and the 2006 Venice Architecture Biennale. His 2002 photobook, "Spider's Strategy" is widely known as his major publication.
His photographs are included in major collections such as MoMa, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, and Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. He received the New Photographer Prize from the Photographic Society of Japan in 1997, the Ken Domon Prize in 2000, and the Ina Nobuo prize in 2014.
