Hiroshi Watanabe’s Love Point is the sixty-sixth entry in Nazraeli Press’s One Picture Book series, and it takes the series’ logic seriously: a small hardcover, sixteen pages, seven duotone plates, and one original print. The book is a pocket-sized version of a larger collaboration with the novelist Richard Curtis Hauschild, whose text accompanies Watanabe’s photographs. That pairing of image and fiction gives the work its distinctive register. The subjects indexed by the catalog — girls, dolls, sailors, portraits — suggest a narrative world that hovers between observed life and staged story, and the duotone plates are the medium through which that ambiguity is held.
Watanabe was born in Japan and has built a substantial body of monographs, artist’s books, and exhibitions, and Love Point is his first publication with Nazraeli. The press has long treated the photobook as an object with its own syntax, and this volume is a compact demonstration of that conviction. The scale is intimate, the sequence brief, and the inclusion of an original print distinguishes the book from a simple trade edition. The collaboration with Hauschild matters here: rather than illustrating a text, the photographs and prose appear to have been conceived together, so that the reader encounters the work as a single constructed narrative rather than as pictures with an appendix.
For a collector, the interest lies in the intersection of three things — the One Picture Book format, the collaboration between a photographer and a novelist, and the presence of the print. The series has become a reference point for how small-format books can carry serious photographic work, and this title sits within that lineage. Its subject matter, drawn from a world of girls, dolls, and sailors, invites the kind of close reading that a sixteen-page book can sustain: each plate earns its place, and the prose provides a counterpoint rather than a caption.
The book is hardcover, 5 1/2 by 7 1/4 inches, with the print included. It is not an overview of Watanabe’s career; it is a concentrated collaborative project, and it should be approached as such. Its significance is bound to the way it uses the series format to test how photographs and fiction can share a single, small stage.
