Paris, 1954–55, in colour. That is the substance of this large-format volume from the Asahi Shimbun Company: 170 photographs Ihei Kimura made in the city across two years, printed in colour so that the period’s streets, clothing and daily atmosphere register as he recorded them. Kimura is the photographer throughout; the essays gathered around his pictures are the work of other writers.

Kimura’s Paris pictures had appeared in book form once before, in 1974. The edition of 2006 returns to the material at a larger scale and adds photographs that had not previously been published — an expanded presentation of the earlier work. Fresh attention to the work followed its presentation at Arles, and the 2006 volume gives that renewed attention a substantial book form.

Colour is what sets the series apart. A Japanese photographer working in Paris in the mid-1950s, Kimura used colour to register the atmosphere of city life, bringing the streets and clothing of the period into view. The photographs connect the city’s public spaces with the everyday presence of its inhabitants. The palette belongs to its moment, and the book’s design gives the pictures room to be looked at slowly.

The apparatus is bilingual, in Japanese and English. Martin Parr and Eiko Imahashi contribute essays, while supervision is credited to Takeyoshi Tanuma and Ryuichi Kaneko — a grouping that places Kimura’s Paris work within wider discussion of Japanese photography of the postwar decades. The book runs to 288 pages in hardcover.

For a collector, the case rests on what the book is: an expanded, carefully produced presentation of a body of 1950s colour work, issued at large format with bilingual text and essays that supply context. Where the postwar Japanese photobook is treated as a serious subject, it is a publication worth knowing.