ERIN C. DUNIGAN | DATE 6/11/2013

Rinko Kawauchi: Playing with Fire

Featured image, by rising Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi, is reproduced from her recently released photobook, Ametsuchi, published by Aperture. This powerful image captures the centuries-old Japanese tradition of farming with fire, or yakihata. Fittingly, themes of regeneration and rebirth, and the transcendence of time and memory, play an important role in Kawauchi’s new book. As with her previous publication, Illuminance, Kawauchi presents intensely moving images, lushly colored fragments of everyday life. In this gorgeous new volume the reader is at once transported to the heavens, earth, stars and mountains; the result is a moving meditation on the beauty and ephemerality of existence. This balance is further enhanced by the publication's stunning design. According to the book’s designer, Hans Gremmen, an unusual variation on Japanese binding "introduces a 'parallel world' on the inside of the pages... By inverting the images, the existential and poetic nature of Kawauchi’s work is enlarged: fire turns into water, night turns into day."
For more on Ametsuchi's unique design, see Brian Sholis' interview with Hans Gremmen on the Aperture blog.