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.
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.
