A Gentle Wander through Japan

The book centres on a navigation through a landscape, an encounter between a glance and rural Japan. In Slow Boat (2003), republished in 2017 by Imageless, photographer Koji Onaka compares sailing a boat to his lifestyle and to photography through 84 images.

Koji Onaka’s work can only be understood within the overall context of his career. Born in Nogata on Kyushu island in 1960, he spent two years working for the steel producer Nippon Steel before heading to Tokyo and joining the class run by Daido Moriyama, ‘Image shop CAMP.’ There, he met artists like Masahisa Fukase and Takuma Nakahira. In 1988, he opened Gallery Kaido, and now also manages the publishing house Matatabi.

A journey between industry and nature

The autofictional work Slow Boat unfolds over the course of the author’s wanderings. Tinged with melancholy and mystery, it connects ‘photographic subjectivity’ and the ‘objectivity of the real.’ In this book, his last to contain photographs taken in black and white, the artist focuses on contrasts. Slow Boat retraces his life and his encounter with a particular period, during a trip across Japan from 1983 to 1999. The photographer moves away from streets and cities in favour of panoramas featuring ports, fields, and rivers, where countryside, industry, and nature meet.

As Koji Onaka explains in the text accompanying the book, this project aims to be an allegory for his way of approaching photography. ‘If you choose to go on a railroad, the path is predetermined, it’s controlled. Whereas if you are in a boat, the path is influenced by a variety of factors that are constantly changing, like the wind, the tides, the currents, and personal choice… A boat is also small and fragile.’ These wanderings through territories with no set objective shed light on the emotional dimension of places, which adapts to the individual viewer’s sensibility.

Revealing another facet of his work, the book Long time no see (2011) presents photographs of Koji Onaka as a child, taken by his father, and reworked and coloured by the artist himself.

Slow Boat (2017), a book of photographs by Koji Onaka, is published by Imageless.