Hajime Kimura’s Artist book “scrap book” is SOLD OUT NOW!

10/23/2021

Hajime Kimura’s Artist book “scrap book” is SOLD OUT NOW! THANK YOU!

The story of the book is composed mainly of handwritten illustrations and photographs taken by the artist, Kimura, of people’s lives in the mountain villages of Niigata between 2007 and 2014. After printing them out, he cut out each one with scissors and pasted them on the pages of the notebook.

The completed dummy won the third prize at the 2014 Kassel Dummy Award, a German dummy book award, and was published by the German publisher Verlag Kettler.
The book is based on a dummy edition of the same title published in 2014, and has been revised in several places to faithfully reproduce the original form.
Thirty-nine copies will be produced as an artist’s book by the artist.

One day, the mountain full of negative film sitting on my table collapsed (Kerplunk!).

Some have fallen onto the floor. I picked them up abruptly with both hands and placed them back on the table. As I opened the door to leave the room, a shaft of light crept into the room and illuminated the pile. I noticed something; it was the number I had scribbled onto the negative sleeves indicating the years I have been working on this project.

It was August 2014. The buzz of cicadas intensified in my ears through the window. My sweaty, damped fingertips decided to pull out a strip of negative film from the mountain of negative sleeves. One frame hinted at a thundering cloud. The strip had turned slightly purple – probably because of the lack of fixing, I thought. As I moved the transparent negative film from side to side, my eyes flickered, and the film inverted positive for a moment. It has been seven years since I started photographing the mountain villages of Niigata.

While casting my eye across the films, vivid memories from the time in Niigata came rushing back. I was standing at home in Chiba Prefecture in Tokyo where houses look like plastic models and roads are coated with grey asphalt. The sensation of gripping onto earthy ground was tingling through my toes. The sound of waves crashing onto river rocks was ringing in my ears and a wind had swept the smell of trees from the countryside. Far away from Niigata, these film negatives brought me back to the mountain villages, wondering how people from the villages are doing.

Hajime Kimura
※English proofreading: Louis Lim

©︎Hajime Kimura / scrap book

[ Book Specifications ]

Hajime Kimura’s artist book scrap book
Number of pages: 146pages
Size: 132 x 218 x 18 mm
158images
19illustrations
Year: 2021
A limited number of production: 39 copies (all editions signed)

Hajime Kimura’s Artist book “scrap book” is SOLD OUT NOW! THANK YOU!

From the page spread of the photo book scrap book: Hajime Kimura