Naked City Varanasi — Takeshi Ishikawa's four-decade record of a city in contradiction
Naked City Varanasi is a 2020 photobook by Takeshi Ishikawa, published by Sokyusha as a signed edition. It documents Varanasi through 95 photographs made across nearly four decades of return visits, beginning in 1980 — a body of work built from sustained presence rather than a single encounter.
About the work
The book holds together subjects that resist easy categorization: pilgrims and ascetics, burning ghats and crowded alleys, the naked and the adorned, the living and the dead. Ishikawa does not reduce Varanasi to a single symbolic register. The photographs remain faithful to the city's internal contradictions — sacred and profane, rich and poor, devotion and its physical cost — without resolving them into a coherent thesis. That refusal of reduction is consistent throughout the sequence.
The authority of the work comes in part from duration. Ishikawa's first visit was in 1980, and he returned almost every year for roughly four decades. The accumulation of that attention produces a visual record that is dense and specific rather than impressionistic. Contextual texts by Kenin Ito accompany the photographs, providing written grounding for the visual material.
Who this book is for
This edition is relevant to collectors of Japanese Photobooks, readers engaged with documentary photography and long-form photographic projects, and those with a specific interest in India, Varanasi, or the visual treatment of sacred and mortuary space. The signed status and the scope of the underlying project make it a considered acquisition for any of those contexts.
About Takeshi Ishikawa
Takeshi Ishikawa was born in Japan in 1950 and graduated from Tokyo Visual Arts in 1971. After a chance meeting in Tokyo, he became an assistant to W. Eugene Smith during the Minamata years, later followed Smith to New York, and began working as a freelance photographer in 1975.
His later work includes long-term photographic engagement with India — hijra communities, sadhus, and related subjects in which sanctity, dignity, and destruction exist in close proximity. That sustained attention is the foundation of Naked City Varanasi, which approaches the city not as spectacle but as a place where contradictory states of being are constantly and simultaneously present. Browse further titles by Takeshi Ishikawa in the Lokator100 catalogue.
