DATE: 1/1/2013 | BY CORY REYNOLDS

Illuminance: Hope, Humanity and Wonder for the New Year

When Rinko Kawauchi's Illuminance was published by Aperture in 2011 (the first volume of Kawauchi's work to be published outside of Japan), the first printing sold out immediately, garnering rave reviews from photo insiders like Vince Aletti, who wrote, "Rinko Kawauchi’s Illuminance could be the year’s most beautiful photo book. Her 12th since 2001, when she published three books simultaneously, it’s culled from 15 years of work and loosely tied to the theme of light. Typically, her subjects are both ordinary and extraordinary: a burning cigarette, a suckling baby, a dead bird, a drop of water on a lily pad, a lunar eclipse. In a sequence of radiant color images that feels at once deliberate and random, she strikes an ideal balance between weight and weightlessness, the concrete and the ephemeral." Now available again in a second printing, it is ideal material for pondering the impossible beauty of our short time on earth, as we enter into a fresh new year.