Katsu Naito arrived in New York from his native Japan in 1983, when he was eighteen, to work as a contracted kitchen chef. By 1988 he had settled in Manhattan’s Harlem neighborhood, an area only just recovering from the economic devastation of the 1970s and on the cusp of the drastic dislocation brought upon longtime residents of that historically Black community in the 1990s. An outsider in all but residence, Naito traced the streets of his neighborhood on foot, camera in hand, for two years before shooting his first frame. Slowly he became familiar with the people and community among whom he lived, and they with him, until the necessary trust was built to record, with quiet tenderness, a time and place that would soon undergo abrupt transformation.

Once in Harlem, published by TBW Books in 2017, brings together landscape photography, environmental portraits, and makeshift plein air studio portraits, a combination the publisher describes as reminiscent of Richard Avedon’s more elaborate outdoor staging and charged with the empathy and warmth of a kindred spirit. The publisher frames the work as both a continuation of the American photographic tradition of foreign-born artists chronicling American peoples and customs and a vital historical document. The book is Naito’s second monograph and his first with TBW Books.

The publisher notes that the project builds on Naito’s ability to intimately engage with his subjects, creating emotional dialogues that can transcend bounds of ethnicity, gender, and socio-economic strata, to, as he puts it, “look into each other’s soul to build another dimension of a relationship.”

Produced as an embossed paperbound hardcover with a tip-on image, the book runs 100 pages with 55 duotone plates and measures 235 by 292 mm (9.25 by 11.5 inches). It carries the ISBN 978-1-942953-32-6.