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 in the year before his death in February 2020. The book draws on Kurata's nude photography from the 1980s, presenting 79 images across 208 pages — many of them previously unpublished, reproduced from original negatives.

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. As editor Amanda Ling-Ning Lo writes in the afterword: "Over a 40-year career, Kurata continued his dialogue with the camera. Can a certain moment become an eternity? Will the story of all existence be affirmed and accepted under the same sky?" The photographs return repeatedly to questions of desire, memory, and the durability of the photographic moment itself.

Kurata began publishing selections of this nude work in the magazines Shashin Jidai and Shashin Sekai between 1985 and 1989, collecting them in the photobook Quest for Eros in 1999–2000. Eros Lost revisits that decade of work through images that did not find their way into earlier publications, drawn from Kurata's original negatives. 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.

Seiji Kurata (1945–2020) was born in Tokyo and graduated from the Workshop School of Photography in 1976, having studied at Tokyo University of the Arts under Shomei Tomatsu and others. His debut book Flash Up (1980) received the Kimura Ihei Award for its documentation of Tokyo's nightlife — motorcycle gangs, yakuza, cabarets — and established his reputation within Japanese photography. Subsequent publications — Photo Cabaret, Great Asia, '80s Family, Japan, and Quest for Eros — extended that work across four decades. His photographs have been shown internationally, including at Fondation Cartier in Paris and the Barbican Art Gallery in London.

This title is part of the Photography & Photobooks catalogue at Lokator100.