David H. Gibson’s A Walk Through A Bamboo Grove is built around a single place: Hokoku-ji, a Zen temple in Kamakura, Kanagawa, Japan, and the moso groves that surround it. Kamakura is a seaside city known for its Buddhist temples and Shinto shrines, and its moso bamboo grows to exceptional heights. As new leaves unfurl and older ones fall, the ground inside the groves is covered and the air stays cool and dim. Gibson’s sequence follows the paths laid through that landscape, past ancient stone lanterns and unexpected clearings, and registers the repeated rhythm of the bamboo’s segments. Looking upward, the grove suggests a cathedral whose roof is the sky.
Nazraeli Press issues the book within One Picture Book Two. The format is deliberately compact: hardcover, sixteen pages, eighteen four-color plates, and one original signed photograph. That economy shapes how the work is read. A short sequence can be taken in at one sitting, so adjacency and pacing matter alongside any individual image, and the plates must hold a place that is cool, dark, and floored with fallen leaves. The volume carries no explanatory apparatus, leaving the sequence itself to carry the temple paths and the light that filters through the grove.
Gibson’s contribution to the series is specific: a documented location and a defined sequence. The Kamakura grove is the subject throughout rather than a backdrop, and the photographs treat the paths, the stone lanterns, and the bamboo’s measured intervals as related elements of one continuous passage. The result is a compact, deliberate project rather than an overview of a career. Anyone who knows the series will recognize how tightly the book’s scale is matched to the place it describes.
For a collector, the volume’s structure matters as much as its subject. One Picture Book Two pairs a printed sequence with an original print in the same book, and this title is limited to 500 numbered copies, each including a 5 x 7 inch original print signed by the artist. The combination places a concentrated body of work at book scale in the reader’s hands while keeping a physical photograph, signed by Gibson, as part of the object. The interest lies in how closely the book form and the place are matched.
