本の本の本 2016 – 2020

Stemming from my passion for Japanese calligraphy and graphic design, I started this photographic series during a residency at the Palais des paris in Japan in 2016.

The kanji 本, pronounced \hon\, means book when it is alone, but it can mean numerous other things when associated with other ideograms. It is for example the second ideogram in 日本, Japan in Japanese. During the residency, I would scan my surrounding everywhere I would go looking for the kanji 本 I would usually find outside of bookshops on big colorful signs.

I became obsessed by this sign that I would track down looking for bookshops. I started taking pictures every time I would find one, always in the same fashion, in a very frontal close framing, the sign being out of focus when it was too small to get a clear shot.

That sign was at the center of the works I produced during the residency and when I came back home, I produced a small brochure with all the photographs in a format inspired by Sol LeWitt’s Photogrids.

But this research wasn’t over yet. I was still finding 本s everywhere I would go and my own activities led me to produce more of them. I even named my bookshop 本 \hon\ books.

So in 2019, I decided to go back to Japan to take more photographs, and continue the series in order to have enough of them to publish a book similar to the LeWitt book that inspired me.

The succession of 本 signs in the pages of the book tells this story. The first hundred of them come from the residency trip in 2016, then comes what I found in other countries and the ones that were generated through my own activities. Most of the second part of the book are the pictures taken during the second trip in 2019 and in Paris until 2020.