Publisher/新潮社

Google翻訳
"Photoworks by Kobo Abe" is a photo collection by Kobo Abe (1924–1993), one of Japan's leading novelists and playwrights. In 1951, he won the Akutagawa Prize for "The Wall," and in works such as "The Woman in the Dunes," "The Face of Another," "The Burnt Map," and "The Box Man," he sharply depicted the alienation and anonymity of people living in cities, and the boundaries between self and other, becoming a representative avant-garde writer of postwar Japanese literature that was highly acclaimed internationally. He had a deep interest not only in literature and theater but also in photography, carrying a camera with him daily and becoming so engrossed in photography that he set up a darkroom in his home, leaving behind approximately 10,000 photographs in his lifetime. His photographs, which capture urban alleys, ruins, crowds, architecture, and human figures, are imbued with the loneliness, anxiety, and strange sense of unease lurking in everyday life that are common to his novels. In particular, in "The Box Man," he uses his own photographs as part of the work, and the protagonist's gaze, looking at the world through the peephole of a box, overlaps with the act of looking at the world through the "box" of the camera. This book commemorates the 100th anniversary of his birth and features approximately 100 carefully selected images from his vast archives. Edited and designed by Kazuya Kondo, who also worked on "The Complete Works of Kobo Abe," this is an important book that, for the first time, presents the visual and intellectual world of "Kobo Abe the photographer" in a truly comprehensive way, rather than merely as a side project.