Rinko Kawauchi: Sheets

With every new publication, acclaimed Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi (born 1972) reimagines the terms of both her own work and the photo book as a form, while retaining her special capacity to depict the world with a palpable delight and awe. Sheets continues this adventurous trajectory. It consists of contact sheets from a variety of Kawauchi’s previous projects, re-edited here as a cinematic narrative or scrapbook, with gatefolds interspersed throughout to punctuate the strongly rhythmic character created by the contact sheets’ black frames. At once emphatically ordinary and lusciously transcendent, these color images of veiny palm fronds and water droplets on lotus leaves, waterfalls, birds, butterflies, open skies, domestic activities, bleached-out beach scenes and street lamps aglow at night celebrate ephemeral luminosity and everyday epiphanies. Sequenced by Kawauchi and publisher/editor Misha Kominek, and designed by Kominek and Claudia Ott, this hardcover volume opens up a new dimension on Kawauchi’s much-admired oeuvre.