Synthesis — Mari Katayama
Synthesis is a large-format artist's book by Mari Katayama, published by SPBH Editions / MACK in September 2025. It gathers nine photographic series made between 2019 and 2025, produced in Katayama's home studio in Gunma during a period shaped by motherhood and a return to her home prefecture. The book's central concerns are body, memory, and transformation.
About the book
The nine series collected in Synthesis — among them Tree of Life — were made over six years inside Katayama's home studio in Gunma. That studio operates throughout as both a space of sustained attention and a controlled stage: Katayama positions her body in relation to hand-sewn sculptures, threaded forms, paper collage, and constructed interiors. Each image is a deliberate composition in which identity is assembled through repetition, material, gesture, and spatial arrangement. These are not incidental self-portraits.
The publication's particular quality lies in its refusal to stabilise a single image of the body. Katayama's practice treats the body as something staged, remade, measured, dressed, doubled, and re-examined — and across the full span of Synthesis, that logic becomes unusually legible. Opposites are held in tension rather than resolved; personal history is carried forward through transformation rather than closure. The result is materially dense and formally controlled.
Synthesis functions simultaneously as a photobook and an artist's book. The nine series are sequenced with the precision of a constructed publication, and the objects Katayama makes — sewn, assembled, worn — are as integral to the images as the body itself. The book does not separate craft from image-making; in this practice, they are the same operation.
Published under the SPBH Editions imprint by MACK Books — SPBH Editions became an imprint of MACK in January 2024.
For related titles, browse Photography & Photobooks, the Body: Desire, Form & Performance collection, or the full MACK Books catalogue.
