Portraits that resist being understood. Looking at a person in a photograph we try to learn who they are from age, gender, clothes, expression and traces of everyday life, yet the more precisely every detail is rendered, the more the person slips away from any understanding of what they are: visible, but unknowable, an other who cannot be reduced to our reading. The moisture of the skin, the tension held in a body, the firmness of muscle, the strength and wavering of a gaze: light touches things, reflects and reaches the camera, and the material texture fixed in the picture acts on the viewer's own body. Portraiture has remained an important theme for Ryuichi Ishikawa, and the book gathers pictures of people in which something remains that words and interpretation cannot account for.