Star Man and two more: the photobooks, 1973–1994

Before there were prints on this site, there were books. Ikki Mitsuhashi published three photobooks over twenty-one years, each made at a different moment in a life that moved from graphic design into photography. This is a short guide to all three.

Star Man (1973)

Two spreads from Star Man (1973).

Star Man was his first photobook, published in 1973 by Shashin Hyoronsha in Tokyo — the same publisher that, in the early 1970s, issued Daido Moriyama's Bye Bye Photography and Shomei Tomatsu's I am a King. It is a large, slim book: 28 pages, 35.5 × 34 cm, softcover, with a white cover and the title in red script. The model is Hiroshi Inoue.

It was published in February 1973, a month after Mitsuhashi turned from graphic design to photography, and eight years after he joined the Nippon Design Center from Musashino Art School. Its subject, in the words of the Tokyo photobook dealer Made in Wonder, is "another self within one's heart": an onlooker who watches coolly and slowly draws closer. His assistant on the book was Michio Kamijo, who later joined the photographers' gallery CAMP. The designer's eye is everywhere in it.

For collectors: signed first editions are scarce. Copies have sold at European auction for roughly €280–350, and the book turns up at Japanese photobook specialists such as Made in Wonder.

Long Long Long Beach (1982)

Long Long Long Beach (1982): the cover, and a spread from the Florida sequence.

Long Long Long Beach was published in 1982 by Sansosha, Tokyo, two years after Mitsuhashi closed his design studio to photograph full time. It is a contemplative sequence made on a Florida beach — figures before the sea, the past weighed against the present — with text by the screenwriter Shin'ichi Ichikawa. One line from it has stayed with readers: "Everyone was watching the ocean."

It was published at ¥1,800. The artist's own portrait appears on its biography page, which is where the photograph on our About page comes from.

Elvis My Happiness (1994)

Elvis My Happiness, published in 1994, is a photographic pilgrimage through the landscapes of Elvis Presley's life. It draws on photographs Mitsuhashi made in the United States decades earlier, which makes it the book closest to the American archive the studio intends to publish in future.

Where the books meet the prints

The books are sequences, meant to be read in order. The prints on this site are single pictures, meant to be lived with. What connects them is the same restraint: an unhurried eye, and pictures that give the viewer room.

If you are coming to the work through the books, the collection is the place to start, and how to read an edition number explains how the numbering continues the artist's own.