Published by MACK in 2017, Fumi Ishino’s *Rowing a Tetrapod* gathers black-and-white photographs made across the United States and Japan, the two countries between which the artist has lived. Its subject is not simply travel or cultural comparison, but the unsettled condition of moving between social worlds whose norms and values do not fully coincide.

The book is arranged according to an aleatoric structure rather than a conventional narrative. Japanese schoolchildren appear beside American astronauts; vernacular buildings, laboratory scenes, local cuisines, animals, and studio still-lifes enter the same field of association. These encounters refuse a stable hierarchy between the familiar and the strange, the local and the foreign, the domestic and the cosmic. Meaning remains deliberately provisional, shaped by unexpected proximity and the possibility of misreading.

That method gives the work its particular force. Ishino does not resolve the cultural distinctions his photographs invoke; instead, he bends them into an imaginary space where categories become unstable and recognition is continually corrected. The black-and-white images intensify this process, allowing disparate subjects to converse through form, tone, and sequence rather than through explanatory context.

For collectors, the book merits attention as a focused early statement by an emerging artist, and as a carefully constructed photographic object in its own right. The 176-page hardback includes 94 tritone plates, presenting Ishino’s cross-cultural, associative practice at a scale that supports sustained attention to both individual images and the book’s larger rhythm.