Kazuyoshi Usui: Showa 88 (Signed)

Usui Kazuyoshi's "SHOUWA 88" is a photo book conceived on a hypothetical timeline of "what if the Showa era hadn't ended and continued to the present day?" Setting 2013 as "Showa 88," he uses a cyberpunk imagination to bring back to the present the vulgarity, excess, danger, and festivity inherent in the Showa era.

Set in Osaka, Kyoto, Chiba, and disaster-stricken areas, the film unfolds in a world where fictional red-light districts are reminiscent of red-light districts, and where traveling performers, shamans, dancers, geisha, and other characters intersect, blurring the boundaries between documentary and staged, reality and fiction. The intense pink color scheme and dense atmosphere evoke a Showa-era sensibility in which the profane and the sacred, life and death, coexist.

Through nostalgia for a past that never existed, this book contains a critique of modern Japan's homogenization and controlled society. Book design by Satoru Machiguchi. Nominated for the 2012 Kassel Photo Book Award. Limited to 1,000 copies.

[Title] Showa 88
[Publisher] Zen Photo Gallery
[Publication date] 2012
[Number of pages] 78 pages
[Size] Approx. 257*182 mm
[Format] Hardcover
[Language] Japanese
[Title Reading] Showa 88
[Author/editor, etc.] Kazuki Usui/Author,
[printing]
[ISBN]
[Condition] Used Signed [ 6 ] Above average to average (
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Kazuyoshi Usui (1975-)

Born in Tokyo in 1975.
Graduated from the Department of Photography at Tokyo Polytechnic University in 1998.

He is known for his unique worldview that combines photography and direction, based on the desires, religious beliefs, and physical sensations of postwar Japan. His representative work is the "Showa" series, which depicts a virtual world where the Showa era has not yet ended.

He has published photo books such as "Showa88," "Showa92," "Showa96," and "Showa99." In 2012, "Showa88" was nominated for the Kassel Photo Book Award in Germany.
Winner of the APA Award Grand Prize and Jury Prize, he has exhibited extensively both in Japan and overseas.

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