We Have No Place to Be: 1980–1982 — Joji Hashiguchi, 2020 Edition with Foreword by Yoshitomo Nara

A cult document of alienation, punk survival, and transnational youth unrest, We Have No Place to Be is Joji Hashiguchi’s stark and unflinching record of early 1980s subcultures—captured in Liverpool, London, West Berlin, New York, and Tokyo. First published in 1982 and now reissued in this 2020 edition by Session Press, the work reads like a black-and-white howl from the margins, where vulnerability and defiance blur.

Hashiguchi’s portraits are tender yet unsparing, photographing runaways, squatters, punks, skinheads, and loners with a rare psychological proximity. The cover image—shot in Liverpool—sets the tone: a solitary figure in bomber jacket and boots, seated in a doorway scarred with graffiti, framed by brick, shadow, and distance. Hashiguchi doesn’t moralize or aestheticize: instead, he looks directly, with care and clarity, at how isolation takes form across cities and borders.

The inclusion of a foreword by artist Yoshitomo Nara (himself shaped by punk and disaffection) casts the book in a wider cultural echo—between photography and drawing, noise and image. Comparable to Anders Petersen’s Café Lehmitz or Jim Goldberg’s Raised by Wolves, this is a cornerstone of Japanese documentary work with a lasting, underground pulse.

Technical Sheet
Title: We Have No Place to Be: 1980–1982
Artist / Author: Joji Hashiguchi
Date: 2020 (First Edition: 1982)
Technique / Printing Method: Offset, duotone
Medium / Materials: Softcover
Dimensions (cm): approx. 20 × 26
Language: English, Japanese
Pages: Unnumbered
Publisher / Editor: Session Press, New York
ISBN: 978-0-9754280-3-3
Edition: 1000 copies
Condition: NEW