EVERYTHING_1 BOOTLEG EDITION

Kenta Cobayashi
EVERYTHING_1 BOOTLEG EDITION

Photographs: Kenta Cobayashi

Publisher: Newfave

80 pages

Year: 2020

Comments: Unbound softcover, 29,7cm x 21cm. Printed in B&W. Out of print

This book is a bootleg edition of “Everything_1”. Bootleg Edition is a reproduction in various ways of previously published title from Newfave.

Born in 1992, Kenta Cobayashi is a photographer based in Shibuya, Tokyo. He has exhibited widely in group shows such as The Exposed #7 (curated by Kohei Oyama at g3+G/P Gallery in Tokyo, 2014) and The Devil May Care (curated by Hester Keijser at Nooderlicht in Groningen, 2015). Cobayashi also recently held his first solo exhibition, #photo, in April 2016 at G/P Gallery, to favorable acclaim.

Cobayashi’s work is characterized by vestigial digital traces applied onto his images via computer software as a painter adorns a canvas, a form of “tagging” that serves as testament to his existence. He views the vast deluge of images coursing through cyberspace to be a turbid stream constituting a new phenomenon for our times. The moment an image is released into the digital void, it reproduces uncontrollably and wholly irrespective of the photographer’s volition. As part of the young generation of digital natives, Cobayashi’s work represents a fundamental grapple with the promulgatory power of the internet, and questions how photographers are to respond.

This first published installment of Everything shares its title with a blog that Cobayashi updates daily with photographs expressing everything that he sees in the course of daily life. These images are an aggregation of his own feelings of curiosity and consternation toward the changing role of the photographic medium.

As this volume’s theme is “scalability,” it will be possible to bind together this and all future issues of the Everything series released by Newfave.