
My Father's Album
- Publisher
- Akaaka Art Publishing
- Year
- 2022
- ISBN
- 978-4-86541-145-4
- Specifications
- Cloth hardcover
276 x 216 mm
72 pages
Two cover versions with identical contents
Book design by Kaoru Kasai and Yuki Adachi
Prints from a file of negatives that Rika Noguchi's father gave her before he died in 2013. Taken on a half-size Olympus PEN camera, they begin with her parents' honeymoon and go on to document her birth and those of her younger brother and sister. After his death she developed them in small batches in the darkroom, in the order of the dates he had given, and found the images, most of which she had already seen in albums, surprisingly vital; meaning to print a few, she could not stop and went on up to the end of her elementary school years. His pictures show her mother, herself, her brother and sister, the roses he grew and now and then a landscape, some taken close up, some quietly from afar. Following her father's gaze as she printed, she says she thought for the first time about the obvious question of why people take photographs.