Japan Works

This art book publication assembles the work of Brussels-based photographic artist Aglaia Konrad and textual glosses written by architectural critic and Japan scholar Julian Worrall into a joint portrait of Japan's built landscape. Konrad's images range liberally across buildings, streets, cityscapes, and artefacts, while Worrall's texts provide keys and windows onto the social, cultural, economic, political and historical parameters that animate their formation and appearance. The images in Japan Works are drawn from Konrad's journey through Japan in the autumn of 2019. Alongside celebrated icons of post-war Metabolist architecture, numerous photos of generic infrastructure and incidental moments register the surroundings with an even intensity of gaze. Drawing inspiration from the associational method of Chris Marker's cinema, the authors aimed to evoke the experience of a flanuer-like immersion in an intimately known yet foreign place. This was achieved through innovative techniques for placement of text and image in oblique yet linked relation, the use of cropping and chromatic treatment to relate visual content with photographic format, and interleaved chronological sequencing, combining immediacy with distance; understanding with mystery.