Rafu brings Michael Kenna’s long engagement with Japan into the intimate space of the nude. For more than thirty years he photographed the country’s temples, shrines, gardens and landscapes in black and white. Beginning around 2008, he also worked with Japanese women whose occupations included acting, dance, photography, office work and yoga. This book gathers that sustained exploration of the figure, allowing it to be considered as a project in its own right rather than an isolated change of subject within his landscape practice.
Kenna’s account places the relationship with his models at the centre of the work. Their willingness to express themselves and their trust in him made the photographic encounter possible. That emphasis gives the project a useful point of entry: the body is both a formal subject and the presence of a person participating in the image. Kenna describes the nude as an aesthetic challenge within a long history of artistic representation. His position invites attention to what an individual photographer can contribute to an established subject without requiring a claim of novelty.
Nazraeli’s 64-page hardcover translates this project into a deliberately tactile object. Duotone reproduction, uncoated Japanese art paper and a hand-bound cover of deep purple silk give the book a material identity distinct from a set of exhibition prints. These production choices are relevant to how the work is encountered in book form: the photographs belong to an object handled and revisited at the reader’s pace. They also give collectors specific features to examine when assessing this edition.
A selection of the photographs was first shown publicly at Paris Photo in November 2018; the book appeared in conjunction with Kenna’s retrospective at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photographic Art. For readers familiar with his Japanese landscapes, Rafu offers a way to consider the human figure alongside that longer engagement with place. Its interest as a collection item rests in this relationship between an extended photographic practice, a distinct body of work and its carefully specified printed form.
