Puking Rainbows Past and Future
Published in Tokyo by Neutral Colors in 2024.
In December, 2020, I gave my five-year-old son a Fuji Instax camera. Over the next two years the two of us each took hundreds of photographs with the camera, often utilizing the camera’s special double-exposure setting to manifest mysteriously playful images. It’s splendid (and at the same time humbling) to witness that there is almost no difference between the quality of his work and my own. The project, originally a zine and now expanded into a book, draws its title from the early days of the pandemic when we filled an entire drawing book with drawings of all kinds of entities puking rainbows and which he scrawled in his child’s hand the enigmatic title. The book contains 80 images, 40 his and 40 mine, an essay about fatherhood by me also translated into Japanese, Tennbo’s drawings of puking creatures, my advice for him on how to approach adult life, and his observations I dutifully recorded from when he was a very young person.
Please write me directly at the Contact page if you would like a copy.
Sunlanders
Published in London by Bemojake in 2016.
Japan has been my adopted home for some time. I set out to document it not as it really was, but how it appeared to me in nostalgic dreams, devoid of any contemporary markers like smartphones, laptops, corporate logos, or fashion trends. If anything, I wanted to reveal a lost Japan, a place that is both recognizable and yet totally unfamiliar. Like some other countries, especially my own (America), Japan can be like a concept, marketed and distorted and falsely interpreted. My photo book, Sunlanders, similarly to Robert Frank’s The Americans, is an outsider/immigrant’s attempt to wrestle with a country’s purported vision of itself and refashion it as Somewhere Else; a dream can be a truth, albeit an extraordinarily personal one.
Sunlanders has been featured in GUP, It’s Nice That, Feature Shoot, PEN,
L'oeil de la Photographie, and many places elsewhere, and is part of the collection at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.
Please write me directly at the Contact page if you would like a copy.
The Sniper Paused So He Could Wipe His Brow
Published in Paris by The M Editions & IBASHO Gallery in 2021.
Memory has a fascinating way of forming a narrative. We believe we recall something as it happened only to find evidence that events were in fact rather different. I’m intrigued by the flaw of misremembered pasts. I wanted to give form to this bewilderment in my photo book, The Sniper Paused So He Could Wipe His Brow. Comprising 95 photographs drawn from twenty countries, shot over the span of 15 years, all of them handmade darkroom color prints taken with a Diana f+ toy camera, the images feel rooted out from any discernible reality, akin to recollected dreams (which have the same eerie elusiveness of long-past moments). The book is designed in three parts, with a split binding in Parts I & III, so that the reader becomes a collaborator, mixing and matching different sets of photographs in a kind of Choose-Your-Own-Adventure experience. Thus, every time you engage with the book, your reading of it will be unique depending on how you arrange the book’s flaps, reminding the reader that our understanding of things evolves with time and nothing is quite like we remember it.
The Sniper Paused So He Could Wipe His Brow has been featured in C4 Journal, The British Journal of Photography, Photobook Journal, The Independent Photographer, and elsewhere. There is a special edition of the book with one of eight handmade prints in a set of forty available with the publishers.
Copies are available with the publishers, The M Editions and IBASHO Gallery. I also have a few copies left if you’d like to contact me directly for a signed copy.
Middle Life Notes
Published in Tokyo by Neutral Colors in 2019. Written in English and translated into Japanese.
Middle Life Notes is a personal book, a “notebook,” a life’s review told with Diana f+ toy camera images, waka poems, and a short essay that adds up to something like the portrait of the artist in middle age or how I got there. All the images are from Japan and the poems refer to my journey into photography and how I came to find myself.
The book is quite nearly sold out; a few copies remain, so please be in touch via the Contact page if you would like a copy.
Amoeba
Published in Tokyo by Neutral Colors in 2021. Written in English and translated into Japanese.
Amoeba is a love story and marriage tale. It contains a long essay about the strange and improbable meeting with my wife, the photographer Ariko Inaoka, our romantic origins, a long period of travel and youthful exploration, and finally our evolution into persons with responsibility, Ariko taking over her family business and our embrace of parenthood. It contains photographs from fifteen years of coupling, pictures I took of her arranged next to self-portraits of myself, sometimes reflected, other times outlined in shadow. The process of aging is subtle but self-evident, our endurance as two together clear and pronounced.
This book is sold out and unavailable for purchase.
