Nishimura Tamiko: My Journey (Signed)

"Tabibito / My Journey" is a photo book by Japanese photographer Tamiko Nishimura. It comprises 60 black-and-white works selected from approximately 1,500 photographs taken from the late 1960s to around 1980, quietly capturing landscapes and people encountered while traveling.

Views from a train window, fishing boats at a port, people on a street corner, the presence of those close to her. Her consistent approach is to turn her camera not to special events, but to scenes that are an extension of everyday life. For Nishimura, "travel" does not refer to the act of going to a specific place, but to the very act of continuing to take snapshots wherever she is.

What appears on the screen is a series of quiet images that do not strongly assert themselves. Yet, beneath them, there is a sense of time and memory slowly seeping through. Rather than capturing events, the time and space she has experienced emerge as a subtle presence. The book includes previously unreleased works, allowing for a re-examination of her perspective from her early days.

The artist's consistent approach, maintaining the same process from shooting to developing and printing for many years, also underlies this book. The trajectory of her continuous engagement with photography, entrusting herself to the time when images emerge, quietly runs through it. The French binding is also striking.

[Title] Tabibito My Journey
[Publisher] Zen Foto Gallery
[Publication Date] May 10, 2018 (First Edition)
[Number of Pages] Unpaginated (120 pages)
[Size] Approx. 253*222*14mm / 620g
[Format] Softcover
[Language] Japanese, English
[Title Reading] TABIBITO
[Author/Editor] Tamiko Nishimura / Author, Amanda Lo / Editor, Art Director
[Printing] Tokyo Inshokan / Printing and Binding (Noboru Takayanagi / Printing Director)
[ISBN] 9784905453666
[Condition] Used, signed on flyleaf 【7】Good to Fair (Slight rubbing on spine corner)
[Accessories] None
[Featured In] -
[Related Exhibitions] -

Tamiko Nishimura (Born 1948)

Born in Tokyo in 1948. Photographer.
Graduated from Tokyo College of Photography (now Tokyo Visual Arts) in 1969. While still a student, she frequented "Jokyo Gekijo," an underground theater troupe led by Juro Kara, photographing performances and people. After graduation, she met Daido Moriyama, Koji Taki, and Takuma Nakahira, and was influenced by them while assisting with darkroom work.

From the 1970s, she continued photographing while traveling throughout Japan, publishing her first photo book, "Shikishima," in 1973. She continued to create works with travel as her theme, and from the 1990s onward, she expanded her activities overseas to Europe, Central and South America, and Southeast Asia. She has traveled to various places, funding her trips through part-time jobs and magazine work, continuing a practice that inseparably links her life and creative work.

From around 1968 to the present, she has consistently used film and adhered to the practice of producing prints in her own darkroom. She is known for her works that capture the atmosphere of landscapes and people from a poetic, spiritual, and deeply personal perspective. She describes her activities as a "continuous journey," and has continued to take photographs with a nomadic sensibility.

Her major photo books include "Shikishima" (1973), "Atsui Kaze" (Hot Wind) (2005), "Bokei" (Longing) (2012), a trilogy including "Tabibito (My Journey)" (2018), and "Tsuiso" (Reminiscence) (2024). Her works are housed in institutions such as M+ in Hong Kong, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Baltimore Museum of Art, and the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art.

In recent years, she has gained international attention amidst a reevaluation of Japanese women photographers, participating in domestic and international exhibitions such as the Rencontres d'Arles and T3 Photo Festival Tokyo. Through her long years of travel and creative accumulation, she is being reevaluated as a significant artist in the history of Japanese photography.