Enkei Kyouji Takahashi

A photobook by Japanese photographer Kyoji Takahashi.
Self-taught in photography, Takahashi used a Deardorff 8×10 camera with color film, producing images that appeared not only in Japanese magazines and advertisements but also in international publications such as "Purple". His work brought great excitement to the Japanese photography scene of the 1990s and influenced a new generation of photographers, including Noriko Seino.

At the peak of his popularity around 2000, he abruptly stepped away from commercial photography to focus on his artistic practice, leading many to believe he had disappeared from the public stage. However, in 2016, he resumed commercial photography, since then continuing to pioneer a unique form of photographic expression free from conventional frameworks.

This book, first published in 2009 as his first photobook in 12 years, presents a series of snapshots taken at a fixed point in front of construction-site shutters in the city during twilight, just before sunset. The work evokes a resonance with "Labor Anonymous" (1946), Walker Evans’s series capturing workers in Detroit, an industrial city in the American Midwest.