soul and soul

Originally self-published in 1972, Soul and Soul was Kiyoshi Suzuki’s first photobook. The 2010 complete reprint by Hakusuisha returned a long-unavailable title to circulation and made it easier to see why this book is so often described as both his debut and one of his defining works.

Suzuki was born in 1943 in Yoshima, Fukushima, a coal-mining area, and emerged in the late 1960s with the Coal Mining Town series in Camera Mainichi. That origin matters. Soul and Soul does not look back at regional life from a safe historical distance; it grows out of lived proximity to labor, decline, and the changing landscape of postwar Japan. Miners, women workers, projectionists, pro wrestlers, and itinerant performers appear throughout the discourse around the book not as fixed social types, but as presences carrying the weight of a vanishing world.

Suzuki’s importance also lies in the fact that he treated the photobook itself as a primary medium. Exhibition and archival material note that his experience working in a printing shop informed the way he made books, and Soul and Soul was produced with his own handling of design and layout. Across the eight books he left behind, almost all self-published, sequencing and construction were never secondary to the photographs.

That is why the book still feels contemporary. It is not simply a document of the Showa period, nor a sentimental return to a lost Japan. It is a photobook about how ordinary lives, precarious work, and local memory can be held with seriousness and form. The international rediscovery of Suzuki, especially around the 2008 Noorderlicht retrospective, only made that clearer.

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