Fusako Kodama was born in Japan in 1945 and studied photography at the Kuwasawa Design School in Tokyo. Her work reflects the modernism associated with Kuwasawa Design, which incorporates Bauhaus education. That formation is legible in the photographs gathered in 1960-80, though the book’s subject extends beyond biography. From 1960 to 1980, Kodama photographed the cities and villages of a country in transformation, drawn to the atmosphere of places and the energy of people.

Her approach is defined by timing and frame. Movement is constant in these pictures; gestures are carefree and instinctive, and disorder surfaces without being tidied away. Kodama’s spontaneous framing produces unexpected perspectives in which subjects appear slightly out of sync with their surroundings. The result is a gaze at once gentle and vibrant, attentive to forward momentum. Across 168 pages and fifty plates, the sequencing—edited by Cécile Poimboeuf-Koizumi, who also designed the volume with Perrine Serre—shapes the material into a sustained consideration of twenty years of Japan.

It is the first book of Kodama’s work published in the West, where she remains relatively unknown, and it belongs to Chose Commune’s ongoing efforts to shed light on contemporary Japanese photographers beyond their country of origin. The section-sewn hardcover measures 22 by 26 centimetres and carries text in French, English and Japanese.

For collectors attentive to Japanese photography of the 1960s and 1970s, the book matters for the evidence it makes available: two decades of consistent, distinctive seeing by a photographer whose work has circulated only sparsely outside her own country. Kodama’s subjects are elusive by design, which is precisely what repays returning to the plates.