Synthesis — Mari Katayama
Synthesis is a large-format artist's book by Mari Katayama, published by SPBH Editions / MACK in September 2025. It brings together nine photographic series made between 2019 and 2025, tracing a period shaped by motherhood, a return to Gunma, and sustained work inside the artist's home studio. The book's central concerns are body, memory, and transformation.
About the book
The nine series gathered in Synthesis — among them Tree of Life — were produced in Katayama's home studio in Gunma over six years. The studio functions throughout as both a space of reflection and a controlled stage: Katayama places her body in relation to hand-sewn sculptures, threaded forms, paper collage, and constructed interiors. These are not casual self-portraits. Each image is a deliberate composition in which identity is assembled through repetition, material, gesture, and spatial arrangement.
What distinguishes the publication is its refusal to settle on a fixed image of the body. Katayama's practice consistently treats the body as something staged, remade, measured, dressed, doubled, and re-examined. In Synthesis, that logic becomes especially legible across the full span of the work: opposites are held in tension rather than resolved, and personal history is carried forward through transformation rather than closure. The result is materially dense and unusually controlled.
Synthesis operates as both a photobook and an artist's book. The photographic 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 the craft from the image-making; the two are the same practice.
Published by MACK Books under the SPBH Editions imprint — SPBH Editions became an imprint of MACK in January 2024.
For related titles, browse the Photobooks collection.
About the artist
Mari Katayama was born in 1987 in Saitama and raised in Gunma. She received her B.A. from Gunma Prefectural Women's University and an M.F.A. from Tokyo University of the Arts in 2012. Her practice combines photography, sculpture, sewing, and installation, with the body functioning as both subject and material.
Her exhibitions have included the Venice Biennale, Maison Européenne de la Photographie, and Tate Modern. She received the Higashikawa Award in 2019 and the Kimura Ihei Award in 2020. Synthesis sits within a broader body of work concerned with identity, constructed image, craft, and the politics of perception.
