Kodama began her artistic journey by exploring the classical theme of light and shadow. With a passionate approach, she creates countless variations within the complementary interplay where light shapes shadow and shadow defines light. However, she admits to moments of awe at the overwhelming challenge of grasping the world in its entirety. She wonders whether a tangible structure or framework is necessary to convey her energy. For Kodama, that framework was the book.
One day, on a whim, she decided to make books her subject. Capturing them in monochrome, her abstract photographs gradually stripped the books of their original meanings, allowing something entirely different to emerge.
Through her portrait-like approach to photographing books, Kodama minimizes subjective intervention, leaving room for the viewer’s imagination. A mere stack of paper transforms into a cascading waterfall for one observer, and into a spotlight for another. Kodama eagerly anticipates the moment when photography functions as a platform for perception, cultivating new concepts and serving as a matrix for their growth.
Even when depicting familiar, well-known objects, photography has the power to crystallize nascent ideas in an instant. It acts as a new space, a generative matrix of imagination. Just as light and shadow resonate to create one another, photography reveals unseen dimensions.
This time, Kodama has compiled her works into a photobook. By abstracting books into monochrome light and shadow, combining their transformed images, and returning them once again to book form, she invites us to unravel the result. At this stage, the debate about the reproducibility of the photographed subject fades into the background, giving rise instead to a dynamic movement oscillating between reality and imagination. Within this interplay lies the essence of photography, and Kodama positions herself as an organizer contributing to this exploration.
Personally, I am less concerned with what the subject is and more intrigued by how the photographed subject is perceived—and in that perception, I find freedom.
We invite you to pick up this book and join in this exploration of recognition and perception.
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Author: Mayumi Kodama
Edit: Daisuke Morishita
Graphic Design: Chiharu Kodama
Language: English/Japanese
Translate: Kaoru Nakada
Size: 260×200x14mm
Pages: 96
Number of illustrations: 44 B&W images
Binding: Softcover
First edition: 300 copies
First edition published in Japan, December 2, 2024.
ISBN 978-4-9909567-9-0
Price: ¥5000+tax