Inoue Seiryu & Kojima Ichiro

Seiryu Inoue & Ichiro Kojima

Published by Rat Hole Gallery in 2007, this compact exhibition catalogue brings together two powerful bodies of postwar Japanese photography: Seiryu Inoue’s Kamagasaki and Ichiro Kojima’s Tsugaru.

Inoue photographed Osaka’s day-laborer district with a direct, uneasy intimacy, while Kojima turned the landscapes and people of northern Aomori into dense, almost sculptural monochrome images. One looks toward the heat and friction of the city; the other toward snow, wind, fields, and the severe quiet of the north.

Placed together, their works become less a comparison of two regions than a shared question: how does a photograph hold the weight of a life, a place, and an era that modern Japan was already moving past?

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