Mayumi Hosokura’s Transparency is the new mystery gathers twenty-two black-and-white images in which the nude and the mineral are given equal weight. A hand’s fragile outline, a body curled against itself, the symmetrical face of a crystal: all appear in the same soft, translucent register. MACK published the book in April 2016 as a hardback of sixty pages.

The photographs resist anecdote. Hosokura keeps her subjects close and slightly withdrawn, so that skin and stone read as related surfaces — one yielding, one fixed — and the sequence is held together by an internal logic rather than a plot. The title states the problem the pictures set themselves: what is plainly disclosed can remain unreadable, and what is opaque may be the most familiar thing in the frame. The crystalline imagination of J.G. Ballard’s The Crystal World is a useful companion here, though the book needs no borrowed atmosphere.

Hosokura, born in Japan in 1979, was named a FOAM magazine Talent in 2011 and exhibited that year at FOTOGRAFIA in Rome and at FOAM in Amsterdam. Her earlier series KAZAN (2012) worked in colour, setting the human form against the textures of nature. Transparency is the new mystery returns to that meeting of body and material but strips it down to monochrome and to a cooler, more exacting grammar.

For a collector, the case for the book rests on its economy. Twenty-two plates across sixty pages, in a silkscreened hardback at 23 x 33 cm, give the work room to breathe without padding it; the object is as considered as the sequence. It stands as an early, concentrated statement of concerns Hosokura has continued to pursue.