UTSUSHIE — Katsuhisa Ogawa, 1991

A meditative exploration of form, texture and atmosphere, Utsushie by Katsuhisa Ogawa is a quietly powerful photobook published at the start of the 1990s, offering a personal and abstracted view of the natural world. With its striking cover of birch trunks rendered in monochrome, the book signals its own material language: repetition, rhythm, and the fragment as portal. Ogawa, a Japanese photographer born in 1945, worked largely in editorial and studio contexts before developing a distinctive visual idiom rooted in formal restraint and poetic minimalism.

Inside, the photographs hover between documentary and abstraction, isolating surfaces — trees, landscapes, textures — into a near-cinematic stillness. Unlike Moriyama's visual aggression or Fukase’s emotional density, Ogawa's compositions are almost silent, closer to the meditative tradition of ink painting or wabi-sabi aesthetics. There’s a deep, slow attention at work here — images not about “what” but “how.”

Designed with minimal text and careful sequencing, Utsushie feels like a deliberate act of seeing. Its rarity outside Japan adds to its resonance: a quiet masterwork in the lineage of Japanese photobooks that reward close looking and long intervals.

Technical Sheet
Title: UTSUSHIE
Artist / Author: Katsuhisa Ogawa
Date: 1991
Technique / Printing Method: Offset
Medium / Materials: Hardcover with dust jacket
Dimensions (cm): approx. 25 × 26
Language: Japanese
Publisher / Editor: Rikuyosha Publishing
ISBN: 4-89737-129-5
Condition: Very good