photographs by Yoshiaki Nagashima, text by Robert White, Koichi Shimazu and John Jones
The photographs in this book are simple: a farmer leaning on his fence in Kenya, a horseman sitting quietly on his mount in Afghanistan, a little boy playing basketball in New York. Nagashima, 42, who has a name in Japanese photographic circles, has that ineffable sense of timing that captures the commonality of his subjects. His pictures seem to convey the essence of the people in them. The thankfully brief text in this book, by two Tokyo-based businessmen and an associate, is everything the photographs are not: platitudinous, stuffy and awkward. Kahlil Gibran and Gail Sheehy are reverently quoted, rambling observations are made and the captions include this, for a picture of a young man on a California beach surrounded by gulls: "Solitude is sometimes gladly shared." (ARC International, $35)
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