ONAKA, Koji - Collecting Summers

MY LAST SIGNED COPY; MORE COPIES TO PRE-ORDER AS LONG AS AVAILABLE AT THE PUBLISHER!

Video: https://vimeo.com/246267920 (by photobookstroe.co.uk, thanks a lot!)

'''Collecting Summers' contains all the color shots the Japanese photographer made in 1999, when he switched from black-and-white photography to analog color film. Koji ONAKA was surprised by the abundance of content in the color images and went to places he had already photographed in black and white, but at the time but had spared various places and topics.
'Collecting Summers' is a summer title, but you can see it all year round. Enjoy!" (© Richard G. SPORLEDER)

"Fewer and fewer times have I ventured out to places during the summer over these years. (...) It was in 1999 and I was 39 years old, feeling stagnant in both my career and life, when I quit taking black and white photographs and took up color film photography instead.
Liberated from a kind of heavy seriousness of black and white photography, I came to feel more at ease releasing the shutter aimed at various subjects and scenes I had never photographed before in black and white.

I was surprised at the quantity of information contained in color negatives. Moreover, an amazing discovery for me was that the sky, ocean, flowers, and grassy fields were represented so vividly on paper through the darkroom process.
Feeling that this was a new beginning for my own photography, I started to travel to various places across Japan again carrying my bag filled with rolls of color film. Ashibetsu, Utashinai (Hokkaido); Kanita (Aomori), Kakunodate (Akita); Sanjo (Niigata); Iwai, Awakatsuyama, Onjuku (Chiba); Jogashima (Kanagawa); Saijo (Ehime); Katsurahama (Kochi); Suo-oshima (Yamaguchi); Fukue (Nagasaki); and Naha (Okinawa).....

This year, now 2017, as I sat in my cool, air-conditioned darkroom in the unbearable summer heat just before the end of the rainy season, I longed to see again the photographs of when color photography seemed so fresh to me. This is a book, 'Collecting Summers', compiling those photographs, overflowing with the light of those summer days." (© Koji ONAKA, 2017)