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Reference Point@referencepoint180 Book of the Week: Couples, Hashiguchi Part of our favourite trilogy of photo books, Jōji Hashiguchi’s Couples is a masterpiece of human indexing. 103 photographs of unmarried partners, Hashiguchi spent two years travelling around his native Japan to produce the book, interviewing each couple he photographed and including that next to their portraits. The result is an atlas of sorts, not just of the country and its myriad landscapes but of the era. Beginning in 1990, Hashiguchi’s images capture the moving of a culture between decades, a moment of optimism and technological progression that sat in uneasy companionship with a strength of traditions still deeply entrenched. The couples depicted have little in common, they run the gamut of young lovers and old flames, decked out in modernity or draped in classic garb, illuminated by the metropolis or sitting under a verdant sky. By choosing this arbitrary metric of unmarried partners, just as he had done with Fathers and sixteen year olds in his previous works, Hashiguchi democratises his subjects. They are not chosen based on talent, beauty, status, but instead by the simple facet of their relationship status and so his portrait of the country becomes more honest, less affected by the bias of the photographer. The images themselves have a neutrality to them, a certain flatness. Hashiguchi asked his couples to chose where they wanted their portraits taken, and the uniformity across the book meant that his aritstic input was solely about when to click the shutter. It is a vulnerable place for a photographer, with none of the traditional props and control to hide behind, but Hashiguchi manages to capture something quiet and true in each image. Without reading the text, we learn something about the couple in each picture just from looking, something of their dynamic and their intimacy, of the people they are and the ones they want to present as. It is a wonderful, joyous, endless referenceable, timeless work, in lovely large square format, and we have one first edition copy available for sale right here, for £150. DM us.
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