Mind's Eye Koichi Inakoshi

A photobook by Japanese photographer Koichi Inakoshi.
After working as a graphic designer, Inakoshi transitioned to freelance commercial photography in the 1970s. While he remained active on the front lines as a portrait photographer, leading a busy professional life, he also continued to carry his camera privately—independently of any commission—capturing snapshots of everyday life and his travels for himself.

In 1971, he published his first photobook "Maybe, maybe" a collection of such snapshots. Its free-spirited style—photographs taken without a fixed theme, simply following his intuition—drew wide attention. From then on, he went on to publish numerous photobooks and hold many solo exhibitions, captivating a devoted audience until his sudden passing in 2009.

This volume was published in conjunction with a posthumous exhibition at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum in 2009. It brings together a wide range of works, from his early "Maybe, maybe" to his late series "Basho-kei", allowing readers to appreciate his exceptional sense of composition and free, intuitive gaze.

The book was supervised by Ryuichi Kaneko, a foremost scholar of Pictorialism in Japan, who explored the fragmented history of Japanese photography and wove it into a continuous narrative. Beyond his scholarship, Kaneko was deeply committed to photographic education, fostering future generations of researchers and curators engaged in the study of Japanese photographic history. He also contributed significantly to the formation of the museum itself, participating in the establishment of the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum from its earliest planning stages.