blue affair - special edition-

PRESS
– Conscientious Photo Magazine (USA)
– British Journal of Photography (UK)
– American Suburb X
– PHOTO (France)
– Fisheye Magazine (France)
– Newsweek Japan (Japan)
– IMA Online (Japan)
– Kyodo News (Japan)

“Recurring recollections of his time in a town started infiltrating the dreams of a photographer, pushing him to return to the dream and leaving reality.”
“blue affair” is an experimental shortfilm and a photobook based on the photographer’s dreams of his time spent in the town called Koza.

-About the special edition-

Concept & Design
The design of the artist edition has a connection to the project which is about the recurring dreams and diving into the dream like world.
The artist edition box has a form of a big book. And the artist edition is designed as the book in the book, representing the key word of this project, “recurring”.
The colors of the box and the book refer to the beautiful blue ocean of Okinawa. When you open the box, the bright shiny blue of print case appears, this represents the surface of the ocean. As you go deeper, just like diving into the ocean, you will find the silk screen printed edition number, title, and the key sentence of this work at the very bottom of the box which has deeper blue that represent the color of deep ocean (deeper in the dreams).
I wanted the box itself as a part of this work. The box is carefully designed and manufactured with a traditional technic without machine yet very precisely using all Japanese materials. The prints are the same sold at the galleries that represent my works.

Limited edition silver gelatin print
Artist edition comes with a 30 x 40 cm limited edition silver gelatin print, printed in the darkroom by the artist in the specially made double door box. You can choose one print from 8 different images.

About blue affair
In the pictures captured in Koza by Kosuke Okahara, I don’t see the photographer. It’s not because he was the one photographing, or for some other physical reasons. I don’t find superficial emotions emanating through his lens from either the subjects or from the photographer. This might not make sense, but it feels to me as though while the photographer was with his subjects, looking directly at them, he was actually observing from another realm. What is left are pictures free from superficial emotions such as warmth and sadness and left with an almost unbearable weight of presence. Without a doubt, in those moments, while sharing the same space, he was observing from some other dimension.
– He was surely in the dreams.
Tatsuya Ishikawa / Creative director
(An excerpt from the afterword of the book)