It is rare to encounter a photobook that is able to open up radically new ways of thinking around how the printed picture can operate. There is only so much you can do with the general form. You will have to arrange the pages in some fashion, and you will have to assemble everything in such a way that it fulfills the basic functions of a book.
A gifted artist, however, might decide to leave some conventions by the wayside for the sake of his own work. With Osamu Kanemura‘s Gate Hack Eden, a truly groundbreaking publication has been published that pushes the boundaries of the photobook in any number of ways, all of them good.
The book was published by ori.studio, which sells the book through their online store. I bought it through ShaShaSha (link here), mostly because adding in more books (by different Japanese artists) made shipping costs more palatable. The book is not particularly large, but it requires careful handling and shipping. If you live outside of Japan, you will have to pay for that.
The Japanese Yen is rather weak at the time of this writing, meaning that the book itself costs about $80. That is a lot of money for a book; and yet I need to point out that a lot of recent photobook releases by Western publishers have now reached price points of $75 or $85. From what I can tell, general costs in the world of the photobook (paper, printing, etc.) have gone up quite a bit recently.
If this is of any help, when you buy a copy of Gate Hack Eden, you’re not buying a book. You’re buying a piece of art. In a general fashion, all photobooks are art. But I’m not talking about that low bar. This particular publication is a piece of art in ways that most other books simply are not.
To begin with, it looks and feels like a piece of art. The closest object I can think of that has some similarities to what the object looks like is an external hard drive. The book presents itself as a black block that sits on top of a smaller white block.
If you put it in front of you on a table — to look at the book, you will absolutely need a table — Gate Hack Eden commands its presence. That presence is a lot larger than the size (163 × 117 × 81 mm) would have you imagine.
How do you look at it? In a very basic sense, the object operates just like any other book, or rather it has the same elements as most other books. The black exterior operates like a slipcase. You can slide it off by pulling it upwards. Once that has been achieved, the cover will open: two cardboard pages that fall away from the interior of the book. Now, you can see the individual pages.
You will also see that the book has five sections, each of them sandwiched by two thin, transparent plexiglass sheets (the one at the top is visible before you open the book). To make the book, its makers had to use some material to give everything just enough stability for it not to fall apart.
Four of the sections contain images, the fifth contains essays (in Japanese and English). When assembled, the former are hidden underneath the black slip case, while the latter is visible at the base of the book. One of the plexiglass sheets juts out a little and creates the base for the slipcase to rest on.
Fully assembled, Gate Hack Eden is very stable. Once the slipcase has been pulled off, the objects becomes a lot more fragile.
Again, how do you look at this? In a nutshell, the five sections are stacked on top of each other. The pages are bound using a single screw post, meaning that in order to look at the images you need to swivel them open. If you want to imagine that you’re playing a game of cards, the pages very much behave like playing cards you’re holding in your hands.
The description of the book states that it has 1648 pages. Initially, I found that hard to believe. I don’t know whether it’s true (I’m not going to count the pages). But given how thin the pages are, I have no doubt that it’s true (the essays are printed on thicker paper). The essay section has 48 pages, which gives you four sections with 400 pages each.
What are all of these images? Apparently, each book was assembled from the same set of pages (or rather subsections of pages), albeit in its own order, creating a sense of randomness for each viewer.
In one section, a large number of black and white photographs unfolds. The paper is so thin that one doesn’t really know whether one possibly missed a page. Two pages might have stuck together. But that wouldn’t matter.
The photographs aren’t photographs, they’re fragments of a larger photograph, and that larger photograph appears to show some greenery in front of one of the many soulless buildings that clutter the Tokyo cityscape. It might be a train station or maybe a parking garage or maybe an indoor mall. It doesn’t matter (the complete disregard for the larger cityscape with which Japanese real-estate developers approach erecting buildings is truly astonishing).
There is picture after picture of the same thing, presented as tiny shards of a larger whole. It is these shards that are more interesting than the larger whole, even if that larger whole never becomes visible. Or maybe it does, elsewhere.
When the next shard finally changes to something noticeably different, there is a brief sense of relief for the viewer. But the next subsection turns out to be just as visually jarring as the one before it. It’s Tokyo, after all, the amazing city that manages to hide its beautiful soul behind mind-numbingly boring facades — and consumption, endless consumption. “I don’t like Tokyo,” Kanemura noted in the first interview included in Beta Exercise.
(Between Spider’s Strategy, Gate Hack Eden, or Beta Exercise, you probably noticed some idiosyncratic word choices; compare: “Mass of the Fermenting Dregs […] The distinctive name […] is simply a collection of words that the original members of the line-up liked.”)
“I started taking pictures of developments promoted by big capital,” the artist said in the same interview, “whose values neglect whether or not they are actually liveable for humans, although I felt uncomfortable about it.” And: “Living under the urban capitalist system strips subjectivity from human beings, transforming them into a mere part of its system.”
It’s not all black and white photographs. There also are shards taken from any number of printed materials, from what look like video stills (Kanemura has a background in video and is using that medium as well), and from drawings, busy doodles that channel the photographs’ nervous energy. In between, there also are larger scenes (that possibly appear broken up elsewhere), the types of photographs the artist is known for in the West (think Spider’s Strategy).
All of this combines into an incredibly immersive experience for a viewer. The little black tower disintegrates before her or his eyes (by their own choice), to reveal a visual chaos that means everything and nothing. You will have to shed your expectations of “narrative” or “sequence” when you approach this book, much like you will have to ignore what it means to edit photographs.
Gate Hack Eden exists outside of the widely accepted narrow ideas of how photographs ought to be treated and used. The book uniquely focuses on Tokyo in a way impossible for, say, New York City, Berlin, London, or Warsaw. Whatever you might be able to say about those Western cities, none of them has the nervous energy Tokyo has, and none of them comes even close in terms of creating its own specific world.
“I have no interest in photos that imply something,” Kanemura said in the same interview I quoted from above, “I’m interested in the possibility of the photograph that doesn’t imply anything, cut off from any implication or meaning.” I might as well note that even if that interest is absent, I don’t think it’s possible to escape the clutches of implication quite that easily.
I think it is only through the form of this book — as opposed to Spider’s Strategy — that the artist achieves that goal. The conventional form of the well-known book only brings back too many implications. Here, though, through the inclusion of all of these other materials and through the cutting up of photographs into smaller parts, the aspect of photography as this thing being done with these specific cameras falls away.
Here, photography finally is a form of art that transcends what the vast majority of photographers have been trying to do before. Here, photography becomes art because it acts like it — and not because it follows artificial conventions.
Thus, Gate Hack Eden is a absolutely essential masterpiece, a publication that explodes the boundaries of the photobook. Unlike artists such as Paul Graham, who have remained stuck in making work that ultimately only attempts to showcase the cerebral approach with which it was made, Osamu Kanemura has figured out how to re-define photography.
I’m in awe.
Gate Hack Eden; photographs and images by Osamu Kanemura; essays by Osamu Kanemura and Pauline Vermare; 1648 pages; ori.studio; 2024