Photographs: Hajime Kimura
Text: Hajime Kimura
Published by Reminders Project Stronghold, 2016
First edition (not the later reprint by Ceiba)
All copies are handmade by Hajime Kimura, in a 0-69 edition, signed and numbered (this one is n°62/69)
2 softcover books and a booklet in a slipcase, 420 x 209 mm. Black & white photographs.
Designed by Yumi Goto, Sandra van der Doelen and Teun van der Heijden.
Book 1 a (Snowflakes)
Soft cover
20.5 x 27cm
108 pages
Book 1 b (Dog Man)
Soft cover
20.5 x 27cm
32 pages
Book 2 (Dog Man)
Hard cover
20.3 x 14.1cm
68 pages
"Japanese photographer Hajime Kimura's Snowflakes Dog Man is the needle in the haystack of contemporary photobooks.
This is Kimura's visual reflection on the memory of his father’s passing and an emotional revisiting of his past. Black and white, strong, contrasty, grainy, his images are also often faded, like the memories themselves. Kimura keeps his memories in a box and moves on…
Two smaller books or booklets are housed within a long vertical box, where one ‘book’ slides in on the top and the other (the smaller one) on the side. The title is printed on one end of the box and the edition number on the other.
The smaller, hard cover, landscape format, book Dog Man is Japanese-bound with uncut pages.
The sheets of the bigger, softcover, book Snowflakes are simply held together with a thread inside a thick card cover. Snowflakes also contains a third booklet (using a different, yellower, paper), showing reworks of family album photographs in muted colors. This book also has the edition number.
To me this publication is one of the timeless classic Japanese photobooks.
The concept, editing and art direction was developed in the photobook-making masterclass 2015 by Yumi Goto, Sandra van der Doelen and Teun van der Heijden in collaboration with Reminders Photography Stronghold."
Andreas H. Bitesnich, Achtung photography