Smoke and Steam Kentaro Kumon

The book is a collection of snapshots taken by Japanese photographer Kentaro Kumon during the year 2023, and although small enough to fit in the palm of one's hand, we can certainly sense an invisible chain of time.

Kentaro Kumon has photographed with a clear intention based on a theme he has set himself, including “Sleeping Island” (2022), which focuses on the depopulation problem facing Teshima, a remote island in the Seto Inland Sea, as well as its local landscape, and “Topography of Light” (2020), which captures the landscape and people living there while traveling around peninsulas in various regions of Japan.

But in this film, Kumon's father, who had refrained from doing so to prevent corona infection, became weak, and Yosuke Fujiki(Head of the art gallery Roll in Iidabashi, Tokyo) asked him, "I want to see a different side of Kumon. Try taking some pictures with that old camera of your father's to see if you like them. "

Kumon picked up the Olympus FT, a half-format film camera that his father had given him when he was 18 years old and a freshman in college, and began taking photographs in his daily life without a clear theme, taking walks with his wife around the neighborhood, on family trips, and at his parents' house, which he often visited to get away from home.

He took photographs in the midst of his daily life.

This book is a collection of photographs of people on the street and townscapes taken by the artist on an intuitive, spur-of-the-moment basis. When he later compared them with prints and slides of photographs taken by his father with the same camera, which he discovered when he was sorting out his parents' house, he noticed that the subjects in the photographs were so similar that he felt as if he had borrowed his father's eyes, and he was pleased to find that he and his father had similar eyes.

Accompanying the book is a random original print signed by the artist, and the glossy, thick ink texture unique to photographic paper can be enjoyed as well.

The book was designed by graphic designer Koji Miyazoe.