Eros Lost

Eros Lost – Seiji Kurata

Eros Lost is a posthumous photobook published by Zen Foto Gallery in 2020, assembled in close collaboration with the artist before his death. The book draws on Kurata's experimental nude photography from the 1980s, presenting 79 black-and-white and color images across 208 pages — many of them previously unpublished.

Kurata's method in this body of work is precise and deliberate. Subjects are placed within interior environments — domestic rooms, furniture, machinery — and photographed under elaborate, constructed lighting. Poses are scripted rather than spontaneous, transforming the encounter between body and setting into something closer to visual theater. The photographs return repeatedly to questions of desire, memory, and the durability of the photographic moment itself.

Seiji Kurata (1945–2020) studied at Tokyo University of the Arts and trained at the Workshop under Shomei Tomatsu. His debut book Flash Up (1980) received the Kimura Ihei Award and established his reputation within Japanese photography. Subsequent publications — including Photo Cabaret, Great Asia, '80s Family, Japan, and Quest for Eros — extended that work across four decades. His photographs have been shown internationally, at Fondation Cartier in Paris and the Barbican Art Gallery in London.

Eros Lost occupies a specific position in Kurata's late career: it returns to a decade of work that had remained largely out of circulation, giving sustained attention to images that did not find their way into earlier publications. Within Zen Foto Gallery's publishing programme — which has consistently focused on Japanese photographers working outside mainstream commercial frameworks — the book represents a considered editorial act of recovery and recontextualization.

This title is part of the Photobooks catalogue at Lokator100.