Shinkiro

We had long dreamed of working with photographer Yoshikazu Aizawa, who had already been involved in the BadSeed Zine project by Alessandra Pace, the magazine’s founder herself. His raw and elegant look at the same time, his intrinsic Japanese vision of the point of light, the choice of the model and the way of photographing her immediately won us over. With the help of Roberto Pesci, a long-time collaborator based in Tōkyō, we began to plan an exclusive and unreleased photographic work by Aizawa, and in the end we were able to confront one of his rolls dedicated to model Nao Tokiwa. Very beautiful, direct shots, capable of dialoguing with nature and escaping the canonical gaze of the portrait photographer, to mix with sand, wood, objects, almost trespassing the terrain of street photography.

Alessandra Pace, Jacopo Buranelli and Giuliano Manselli took the time to confront the roll, without knowing anything about Nao, knowing only Aizawa’s artwork and being guided by their own tastes and direct aesthetic feeling. Ryūnosuke Akutagawa was undoubtedly one of the most important and interesting writers of early twentiethcentury Japan, author mainly of short stories. Shortly before his death by suicide in 1927, he would engage in a literary dispute with Jun’ichirō Tanizaki over the character of fiction, arguing against the literary practice he had followed up to that time of the “novel without story,” Tanizaki, on the contrary, argued importance of structure.

Among The so-called “plotless” novels, those of Akutagawa’s last period, we can find Shinkirō (Mirage). This is a short story that appeared in a magazine in 1927. The protagonist speaks in the first person about a trip he made with friends to Kugenuma Beach (near Fujisawa, Kanagawa Prefecture) to witness the phenomenon of mirages. Nothing appears that day. Walking along the shoreline, however, the group of friends finds a piece of wood placed in memory of someone who died at sea. Some time later, the protagonist returns to the same spot with his wife and a friend and this time he hears the sound of a bell preceding the mirage. The mirage is a natural optical illusion. An unreal phenomenon that escapes from canonical logic in that it exists in order not to exist. The point of view is an individual concept, a perception of one’s own way of seeing. The mirage involves everyone, but each character has his or her own different and modified perception of the unreal itself, just as he or she has of the real. Referring to this paradigm as well, we have taken inspiration from Akutagawa’s short story to present photos of Aizawa, model Nao, and the universe around them. Each chapter of this short story/roll is interpreted by a different editor, who explains how he or she perceived the shots. We are delighted that Aizawa sensei has given us this trust.

Shinkiro by Yoshikazu Aizawa
Size: 22x28120 pages
Printed inside on 200 gr paper+ cover and last 350 gr.
Semi-transparent gsk printed dust jacketwith light blue background and black lettering
Spine in GLO gluing for full opening
Limited edition: 300 copies / Uncensored