A pair of spectacles, a page of manuscript, and the light that once travelled between them: that is the narrow aperture through which Tomoko Yoneda works in Between Visible. The photographs were made through the actual eyeglasses of figures who shaped intellectual life across the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — Sigmund Freud, Hermann Hesse, James Joyce, Gustav Mahler, Jun’ichirō Tanizaki, Le Corbusier, Mahatma Gandhi, Leon Trotsky — so that each pair of lenses becomes a filter between the viewer and a text or object that mattered to its owner.

Yoneda’s method is deliberately indirect. We are shown the surface: a printed page, a manuscript, a sheet magnified by curved glass, while the narrative that gives the object its meaning stays out of frame. The title names that gap, the correlation between what is visible and the unstated story beneath it, which, once told, changes how the photograph is read. The images are quiet, exact and cool, and their restraint is the argument.

The book carries an introduction by Kotaro Iizawa and a contribution from Mark Haworth-Booth, and was published by Nazraeli Press in 2004 in association with The Joy of Giving Something, Inc. Twenty-seven pages, in a large hardcover format of roughly 36 by 28 centimetres, it is a book of few plates and considerable weight per plate; the scale makes skimming unlikely.

Between Visible is Yoneda’s first monograph. Since graduating in 1991 she has exhibited widely in the United States, England, Japan and Russia, and the series begun here has continued to develop in later chapters, shown in museums and staged alongside her other projects. The book therefore marks a starting point rather than a summary.

For a collector, the interest lies less in scarcity than in sequence and proportion: this is where a long-running project first takes book form, at a size that lets the smallest evidence register. A separate special edition was also issued, boxed with an original print; the standard first edition remains the clearest way to read the work as it was first assembled.