Gift is the first photobook by Orie Ichihashi, issued in hardcover by MATOI PUBLISHING in March 2009 and distributed by Jitsugyo no Nihon Sha. Its 112 pages bring together landscapes photographed during journeys in Japan and abroad between 2006 and 2008. The project grew through a modest, repeated practice: setting out once a month to make photographs somewhere away from the everyday routine.

A pale blue sky on the cover establishes a gentle register. Blue, clear light and an attentive response to the atmosphere of a place give the photographs their quiet appeal. The landscapes invite attention to the qualities of light and distance that make an otherwise ordinary view stay in the memory. Held together as a book, these encounters can be considered as a sustained way of looking across different places.

Ichihashi was already working across advertising, magazine covers and moving images when Gift appeared. In the same period she photographed moving images and stills for Honokaa Boy. This first collection places her travel photographs alongside that wider professional practice, giving readers a substantial group of landscapes to view as a body of work. The book was edited by MATOI PUBLISHING, with Ichihashi credited for the photographs.

For a collector following Ichihashi’s photography, Gift provides an early point of reference in a bibliography that would expand through further collections. Its interest is specific: the gathering of several years of regular journeys into a single hardcover volume, and the consistent sensitivity to light that connects those journeys. The 2009 edition preserves that first book-length presentation.