{"id":475135,"date":"2026-05-08T18:05:12","date_gmt":"2026-05-08T18:05:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/475135\/"},"modified":"2026-05-08T18:05:12","modified_gmt":"2026-05-08T18:05:12","slug":"takashi-homma-on-his-photobook-philosophy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/475135\/","title":{"rendered":"Takashi Homma on His Photobook Philosophy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Takashi Homma made his name photographing street style in 1990s Tokyo, during Japan\u2019s so-called Lost Decade. Since then, he\u2019s continued to chronicle the vagaries of fashion and youth culture while also turning his distinct yet discreet eye toward suburban life, ocean waves, and radioactive mushrooms, becoming a pillar of contemporary Japanese photography. Now sixty-three, he has amassed an oeuvre of more than sixty publications, including zines, essays, exhibition catalogs, and, of course, photobooks, most recently Portrait of J<\/a> (Dashwood Books\/Session Press, 2025), a love letter to the ordinary people of Japan. Marigold Warner sat down with Homma at his office in Tokyo to talk about his evolving relationship with the medium, and the city itself.<\/p>\n

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Takashi Homma, Marina, model, 2020, from Portrait of J (2025)<\/p>\n

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Takashi Homma, Moka, fashion stylist assistant, 2024, from Portrait of J (2025)<\/p>\n

Marigold Warner: What was the first photobook you ever bought?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Takashi Homma<\/strong>:<\/strong> It was a collection of photographs of Momoe Yamaguchi, a legendary pop idol in Japan. I bought it when I was in high school, and only later realized the photos were taken by Kishin Shinoyama. At the time I had no idea\u2014the only reason I bought it was because I wanted to see photos of my favorite idol.<\/p>\n

Warner: <\/strong>What about the most recent one you bought?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Homma<\/strong>:<\/strong> I haven\u2019t bought any books recently. I definitely don\u2019t buy as much as I used to. Half of this room was once full of books, but I\u2019ve cut it down to a small collection. I think the biggest reason for that is the internet. I\u2019m publishing a new text-based book on photography soon, and whereas before I\u2019d have all these photobooks to dig through for references, now I can just look them up online.<\/p>\n

Warner: <\/strong>Were there any books that you felt you absolutely had to keep?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Homma<\/strong>:<\/strong> The thinner photobooks, and the rare ones. Definitely not the big hardcovers from major publishers. I don\u2019t like things that feel too authoritative or prestigious, like they were made by an important person. Overseas, they call these coffee-table books. In the end, they just become interior decorations that sit on a fancy living-room table. I prefer the slim books that an artist might put out just for an exhibition at that specific time. Jack Pierson once made this small, zine-like book called Angel Youth (1992). I bought it in the \u201990s, and I\u2019ve kept it ever since.<\/p>\n

Warner: <\/strong>Who do you see as a real master of bookmaking?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Homma:<\/strong> I\u2019ve always respected Nobuyoshi Araki. He\u2019s published more than five hundred photobooks. A lot of people, especially designers and architects, want to make these grand, heavy books. What I like about Araki is that there\u2019s a kind of lightness to his work and attitude. As people become more famous, they get heavier, more serious, more rigid. But people like me and Araki\u2014real Tokyo people\u2014I think, crave a certain lightness.<\/p>\n


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Warner: <\/strong>Tokyo has been a subject of your books since you started out. How do you feel about your home city now?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Homma<\/strong>:<\/strong> It\u2019s love and hate. When I was in my thirties or forties, I probably had a different answer. I thought maybe I\u2019d live abroad again, but at this age, it\u2019s more about what I can do now, within the current situation. Tokyo could be hit by a huge earthquake tomorrow. We all know it\u2019ll happen eventually. When it does, and if I\u2019m still alive, I\u2019ll have no choice but to photograph it. That\u2019s kind of where I\u2019m at now.<\/p>\n

Warner: <\/strong>What do you think it is about Tokyo that attracts photographers to make work here?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Homma<\/strong>:<\/strong> In terms of the urban landscape, there\u2019s really no other capital with this level of scrap and build. I was just in Milan and Paris recently, and everything there is built from stone, standing for over hundreds of years. Take Shibuya, for example. This area of Tokyo is constantly under construction, changing so fast it feels like a different person. So, it\u2019s inherently photographic, because photography is best suited to capturing change. Most photographers, I think, take pictures because they love something, or they\u2019re emotionally attached to it. For me, it\u2019s different. For instance, I have a photobook of waves. Everyone always asks me: \u201cHomma-san, do you surf ?\u201d I don\u2019t. Then they ask, \u201cSo, you like the sea?\u201d Of course I like it, but that\u2019s not the reason I photograph it. Waves come and go, crashing in differently each time. They\u2019re never the same. I stand there, and when they come, I shoot. Each one is different. That\u2019s the concept that fascinates me.<\/p>\n

Warner: <\/strong>Your latest book, Portrait of J, presents a collection of images you\u2019ve been taking since 2002. You\u2019ve photo <\/strong>graphed celebrities, friends, children. Is there any particular shoot from the book that stands out to you?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Homma:<\/strong> Not really. They\u2019re all equal to me. For me, famous people and my friends\u2019 children have the same value, and that\u2019s why they\u2019re placed on equal footing in the book. There isn\u2019t anyone in particular who stands out more than another.<\/p>\n

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Cover of Portrait of J (Dashwood Books\/Session Press, 2025)<\/p>\n

Warner: <\/strong>How did you decide on the cover photograph then?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Homma<\/strong>:<\/strong> The cover photo is of the architect Kazuyo Sejima. Wolfgang Tillmans made a photobook of portraits, and his cover features the architect Rem Koolhaas. Mine is kind of a subtle response to that. I\u2019ve also known Sejima-san for a long time, and I knew I definitely wanted the cover to feature a woman.<\/p>\n

Warner: <\/strong>And why the title Portrait of J?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Homma<\/strong>:<\/strong> Because we\u2019re Japanese. Also, there\u2019s a guitarist named John Williams who released an album called Portrait of John Williams, in 1982. I thought that was really cool, and that the title was something I could use someday.<\/p>\n

Warner: <\/strong>You published the book with Dashwood in New York. Was there anything you wanted to communicate about Japan to an international audience?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Homma:<\/strong> That\u2019s a very Japanese-minded question. Japanese interviewers always ask questions like, \u201cWhat do you want to communicate?\u201d Well, whatever the artist wants to say is already contained within the work. They made it because they didn\u2019t want to put it into words. Still, if I had to say one thing, last year Japan\u2019s population dropped by almost a million. If this continues, Japan will soon experience a super-aged society unlike anything the world has seen. The Japanese could even become an endangered species. In that sense, I think this book could be important.<\/p>\n

Warner: <\/strong>Has the way you make or think about books evolved from when you started?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Homma<\/strong>:<\/strong> When I started, publishing a book wasn\u2019t something you could just do. You couldn\u2019t make a book unless a publisher wanted you to, which is completely different from now. These days, every year there are so many publishers asking me to make something. I just respond to those opportunities and keep publishing. When I was in my twenties, I remember thinking it would be enough if I could publish just one photobook. I never imagined I\u2019d end up publishing sixty.<\/p>\n

Since I started, I\u2019ve always decided on about 90 to 95 percent of everything myself. The sequence, the title, the cover\u2014everything. That\u2019s been consistent since my very first book. There are still lots of photographers, especially in Japan, who just throw all their photos at the editor or designer and let them build the whole book. There are definitely a lot of really talented editors and designers here, but I\u2019m more interested in the conceptual side of creating the whole thing, rather than just being a photographer. Wolfgang Tillmans is similar in that sense. He always says in interviews that the actual photographing part is quick. The real time is spent thinking deeply about how to present the work, how to exhibit it, or how to make it into a book. I think that\u2019s natural, but in Japan it\u2019s different. When I first started working that way, Japanese critics and editors said terrible things about me. K\u014dtar\u014d Iizawa, a once-prominent critic who has totally lost his influence now, once said something like, \u201cInside Homma, there are two people, a photographer and an editor. And that is not good.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Cover of Tokyo Suburbia (Korinsha, 1998)<\/p>\n

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Cover of Tokyo Olympia (Nieves, 2023)<\/p>\n

Warner: <\/strong>In your view, what makes a good photobook?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Homma<\/strong>:<\/strong> First of all, it needs to be easy to read and easy to open. Some designers get too obsessed with special bindings, putting it in some annoying plastic case, or tying it up with strings. I like books where you can access the photos directly, and light ones, like zines. When I was living in London in the early \u201990s, there was a photobook store that sold these really thin books of about sixteen or twenty-four pages called \u201cloose books.\u201d One of them was by Nigel Shafran, I think it was photos of his wife before they got married. It\u2019s too thin to really call a photobook, but it\u2019s good. That\u2019s what makes a great photobook\u2014when it\u2019s good on its own terms.<\/p>\n

Warner: <\/strong>Some of your older photobooks are now sold as rare items at high prices. What do you think of that?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Homma<\/strong>:<\/strong> Photobooks don\u2019t usually get reprinted, that\u2019s just how it is. So, they naturally become rare. Even though I\u2019ve published over sixty photobooks, I\u2019ve hardly received any royalties. Most of the time, it\u2019s payment in copies.<\/p>\n

Warner: <\/strong>I suppose making books isn\u2019t something you do for money.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Homma<\/strong>:<\/strong> I was just talking about this the other day, and the question is always, \u201cWhy do you do it,\u201d right? For me, it\u2019s just part of daily life, like eating or exercising. It\u2019s not something I have to do. It\u2019s something that has to happen.<\/p>\n

This interview originally appeared in Aperture No. 262, \u201cThe End of Nature?\u201d, in The PhotoBook Review.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Takashi Homma made his name photographing street style in 1990s Tokyo, during Japan\u2019s so-called Lost Decade. Since then,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":475136,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[267],"tags":[208214,365,362,363,364,366,18,117,19,31679,17,386,63299,208215,8639],"class_list":{"0":"post-475135","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-aperture-no-262-the-end-of-nature","9":"tag-arts","10":"tag-arts-and-design","11":"tag-artsanddesign","12":"tag-artsdesign","13":"tag-design","14":"tag-eire","15":"tag-entertainment","16":"tag-ie","17":"tag-immersive","18":"tag-ireland","19":"tag-japan","20":"tag-photobooks","21":"tag-takashi-homma","22":"tag-tokyo"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/116540285300491935","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=475135"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/475135\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/475136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=475135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=475135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=475135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}