Rinko Kawauchi - as it is - 2020

as it is

Rinko Kawauchi
Torch Press/2020/Japanese/230 × 180 mm

As it is" is a new photo book composed of photographs taken by Rinko Kawauchi of children and familiar scenes she encountered while raising her children over the three years since the birth of her own child. In the 20 years since her first photo book "Utatane" (2001), she has turned her gaze from everyday events to the outside world, and in her recent work "Halo" (2017), she has opened up images that evoke the distant universe. From there, in "as it is," he once again returns to his starting point, looking at the everyday landscape in front of him with his own children and family.

Children up to the age of three have a dazzling mass of life, living without society while their egos are beginning to emerge. In this work, Kawauchi's feelings as a mother are interspersed with short texts, and while it is a story of a family in the present, it also approaches the universality of children as beings full of life force. The beauty of nature and light encountered through the changing seasons, the small creatures found in daily life, the first experience of death - the beauty of life in these small things, and the days that accumulate from this realization. In the year 2020, our lives have been transformed by the new coronavirus. In 2020, our lives will be transformed by a new type of coronavirus, and because we now value the earnestness of ordinary days anew, this book will be a book that will accompany us as we live in a new era, showing a different layer of the landscape we have seen so far.