Onsen I

Yusuke Yamatani
Onsen I

Photographs: Yusuke Yamatani

Publisher: flotsam books

64 pages

Year: 2023

Comments: Softcover, 25,7 x 19 cm, b&w and color photographs. It comes with a small poster.

"ONSEN I" is a project on the hot springs theme that is still ongoing by Yusuke Yamatani. The Unmaintained or hidden site hot springs are called "No-yu" or "Yatou" in Japanese. Yusuke Yamatani started photographs about 15 years ago and began the project of those hot spring hopping and taking pictures simultaneously, so his photographic journey continues today. He is gathering people who want to join, friends and family, sometimes through SNS and even zines. The communication of people around hot springs or waterside as central places are described in "Nihon Shoki(Chronicles of Japan) and "Manyoshu(Anthology of Myriad Leaves)", and as Yamatani continued to photograph at hot springs, he has become to listen primitive times which made him a view of imagining different planets beyond space. The practices related to the project are not limited to the act of photographing nature and human beings that exist unchanged over time, but can also be described as an attempt to recapture the human being and the world itself through the intervention of the body in the landscape as it is.

The cover is designed by Yutaro Yamada, who also created the logo for flotsam books, and made the patterns on the cover were faithfully reproduced by silkscreening and special processing, which were designed by directly capturing with Yamatani the gushing hot springs and sulfur on paper.

(From the publisher's website)