Hiroshi Watanabe’s latest book of photographs highlights the artist’s early works as a young photographer in Japan, before moving to America and becoming a highly regarded fine art photographer. These images bear the raw, youthful energy of a young artist in his twenties, photographing his surroundings, his friends and moments both poignant and mundane. Some photos veer towards a surrealistic sensibility, occasionally playing with and skewing the genre of still-life photography. Many of the images in the book are everyday “snapshots”, intuitively-taken, without the careful planning and exquisite direction of his later work.
In the book’s essay, Kenji Takazawa writes, “The rich potential that snapshots possess has been flowing in the undercurrent of Watanabe’s work…As the Sun Sets on Me, it Rises on You, may be both a starting point and a departure from Watanabe’s origins and hometown.”
The 50 black and white photos in this soft bound book possess a melancholic mood while also conveying a restless spirit and an impulse to find artistic expression in daily life. As the essay describes, the images are “rough” compared to his previously published works and include accidental double exposures and overexposed film.
As the Sun Sets on Me, It Rises On You is published by Dark Spring Press, designed by Robert Gallerani and Andy Burgess, and includes an essay by Kenji Takazawa that was translated from Japanese by Hiroshi Watanabe.