Blue Water Keizo Motoda

*Available only in Europe

The first photobook of Keizo Motoda, who after graduating from Osaka Visual Arts carved out a distinctive place with his street portraiture, published in 2001 as a volume in the Wides Shuppan photography series. Titled in English Blue Water, it centers on monochrome portraits of people met on the street — shot up close with a hand-held large-format camera — searing the presence of souls wandering the city into strong tonal contrast and grainy texture. The intimate, head-on distance at which Motoda confronts his subjects, and his tenacious eye for their raw physical presence, mark the origin of the street portraiture that would continue in later works such as Todoroki and Good Morning from Nagihashi. Rough yet poetic, it stands within the lineage of Japanese street photography.