Chieko SHIRAISHI

"Cactus and Tail"

Pages: 64 / photos: 52
Size: 200x264x12mm / hardcover
Price: 2,730JPY
Release Date: September 2008

Chieko Shiraishi was born in Yokosuka (Kanagawa Pref.) in 1968, and has been exhibiting her photography since 1998. Saboten to Shippo (literally, "Cactus and Tail") is her first photobook.

Saboten to Shippo brings together Shiraishi's work done over a 10-year period from 1998-2008, shot across Japan from Okinawa to Aomori and many points in between. There's not a single person photographed in the book, as if Shiraishi had only visited ghost towns. Yet, the objects and vegetation and buildings she photographs, while withered, are curiously alive at the same time. As Shiraishi writes in the afterword (roughly translated here): "Those things that always appear before my eyes at the places I travel to, for example the chimneys and cacti, the corrugated fences and electric poles and aloe plants, the aging structures quietly breathing deeply in the corners of the towns...they seem to be playing possum."

(Quotation from japan exposures )