Snow Letter is Risaku Suzuki’s second contribution to Nazraeli Press’s One Picture Book series, and it works at a scale that most photographic books avoid: the single snowflake. The volume gathers photographs of individual flakes, the building blocks of the snow imagery Suzuki has become known for, alongside one original photograph. Sixteen hardcover pages hold the sequence. The publisher presents the book as a follow-up to Suzuki’s earlier monograph Yuki Sakura, and it takes its title from the phrase Ukichiro Nakaya used for snowflakes, letters sent from heaven.

The photographs bear the weight of the book’s method. Each flake is examined as a distinct form, given room to be seen on its own terms, so that what usually reads as weather, texture or season is slowed down into structure. This is where the volume’s significance lies: it isolates the smallest unit of snow imagery to show what the larger pictures are built from, and in doing so connects Suzuki’s snow photographs back to an older scientific and poetic attention to the crystal. The sequence carries no more than it needs; the scale of the flake and the scale of the book answer each other.

As an object, Snow Letter follows the One Picture Book format closely: a hardcover publication of modest extent that also contains one original photographic print. The print is not an appendix but part of the reading, and it asks the book to be handled rather than displayed flat. A collector drawn to Suzuki’s snow work will find here the concentrated version of its concerns, held between covers that can be gone through in one sitting.

Suzuki’s engagement with snow is sustained and specific, and this small book narrows that engagement to a single recurring subject. Its interest rests on the discipline of that choice: the photographs, the print, and the compact format all serve the same close attention to a single form.