Chose Commune’s 2020 monograph gathers work by Issei Suda (1940–2019), the Tokyo photographer whose loose, quick eye turned streets into stages of small, unaccountable theatre. Made between 1971 and 1983, the 78 photographs it contains had not been published before the book’s preparation. They show the city and its surrounding prefectures at street level, where children’s sidelong glances and the sudden presence of animals unsettle scenes that would otherwise register as ordinary. The tone wavers between comedy and something cooler; nothing is explained, and no caption arrives to settle it.
That the pictures should appear decades after they were taken is the point. Suda was a photographer of the instantaneous and furtive, close in spirit to his early work with the Tenjo Sajiki theatre company, and these negatives find him at his most alert, working through contrast and omission. His blacks are dense and hard-won, giving the compositions a graphic force that survives the passage of time.
The book itself came about under unusual circumstances. The project began in January 2019, when Suda was still alive; the prints were drawn from his archive in November of that year, by which point he had died at 78 — the same number as the prints the editors had chosen by instinct that autumn. The volume is thus both a selection and a farewell, conceived by Cécile Poimbœuf-Koizumi and Vasantha Yogananthan, who edited and sequenced it, and designed by Bureau Kayser. Its 128 pages are presented as a section-sewn hardcover with a round spine, in French, English and Japanese, with 78 photographs across a 24 by 28 cm page.
For collectors of Japanese postwar and post-1970 street photography, the appeal lies less in scarcity than in the material itself: a substantial, carefully ordered body of early work by a photographer whose public profile was built on a relatively small number of books. Two decades of unprinted negatives, arranged with the deliberation they warrant, make this a considered addition to a shelf already holding Suda’s earlier titles.
