A long-awaited photobook published after eighteen years by the
photographer Keizo Kitajima, who has continued to make his
presence felt in the photo world even though the whole picture
of his work has not been hitherto revealed.

　In 1976 Keizo Kitajima made his impressive debut with photographs capturing Koza in Okinawa, a town near the US military base, in the period just after the end of the Vietnam War. Subsequently, he expanded his purview to include Tokyo, New York and Eastern Europe. While the photographs he made during those periods still strike us with their dazzling quality, Kitajima drastically changed his method of photographing after he visited the Soviet Union in 1991, as that nation was on the verge of collapsing; that is, Kitajima changed his place of work from the street to the studio, and in doing so, he denied the aesthetics of“selection” and “instantaneity” that is typical of street snapshot photography. In his still ongoing series Portraits, using a view camera instead of a hand-held camera, Kitajima repeatedly photographs the same models at certain intervals, following self-imposed conditions and rules. So far, he has photographed more than three hundred people, with the total number of his photographs amounting to over two thousand. This series has neither an ending nor a completion in the usual sense of the words. This means it will attain neither success nor failure. These pictures are no more than “photographs of faces,” which have nothing to do with a sense of beauty or any aesthetic judgment. Still, viewers of this series nevertheless encounter the terrible dynamics of these images. Deprived of any hope of empathy or interpretation, the viewer’s gaze is stopped by the surfaces of the photographs and is caught up in their “denseness without denseness.” But, is not this the specificity of our experience of looking at photographs? We realize, then, that the “photographs of faces” are not representations or substitutions, but instead are nothing but“originals.” What is at stake in this series, which Kitajima has been working on ever since he gave up street snapshot photography, is perhaps more significant than we can ever have imagined.
　Aimed at disclosing the whole picture of the extraordinary photographer Keizo Kitajima’s work, the photobook THE JOY OF PORTRAITS is composed of two volumes (874 pages in total), and the series printed in the book include PORTRAITS (1992—present), Koza 1975, U. S. S. R. 1991 and others, including a number of as yet unpublished photographs.

THE JOY OF PORTRAITS
Hardcover, two volumes with cardboard slipcase, 874 pages, 28.5 x 22 cm (11 x 8 5/8 in)
Published by RAT HOLE GALLERY
List price: 21,000 yen (including tax)
Limited edition of 1,500 copies

THE JOY OF PORTRAITS 1
PORTRAITS 1992-（160 pages）
THE JOY OF PORTRAITS 2
KOZA 1975-1980
TOKYO 1979
NEW YORK 1981-1982
EASTERN EUROPE 1983-1984
BERLIN, NEW YORK, SEOUL, BEIJING 1986-1990
U.S.S.R. 1991
TEXT Shino Kuraishi（714 pages）

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