torikumo — Haruka Fujita
torikumo takes its title from 鳥雲に入る (tori kumo ni iru), a seasonal Japanese expression describing migratory birds disappearing into distant clouds as they return north in spring. Rather than presenting a straightforward sequence of landscape photographs, Haruka Fujita builds the book as a dialogue between photography and the pictorial language of Japanese sliding-screen and folding-screen painting.
Fujita began by photographing sliding panels covered in gold and silver leaf, sourced from an art-supply shop. These images were printed onto photographic paper, after which she layered further photographs — flowers, trees, birds and other natural subjects, shot on 4×5 film — onto the same sheets. The process was carried out by hand in the darkroom, allowing variations in tone, surface texture and the behaviour of the printing itself to enter the final images. The gold and silver leaf belongs to the panels she photographed as source material; it is not applied to the physical pages of the book, and the hand-printing refers to the making of Fujita's original images rather than to the production of the copies themselves.
The resulting photographs combine dark grounds, layered colour and passages of open space. This visual structure extends into the book's physical form: bound as an accordion, or concertina, the connected pages unfold into a continuous sequence, echoing the relationship between individual painted scenes and a longer picture scroll.
Published by HeHe in Tokyo, this is the 2025 second printing of a book originally issued in 2022. The edition runs to 72 unpaginated pages in a hardcover accordion binding measuring 190 × 151 mm, with colour illustrations throughout. This copy is signed.
Readers drawn to Fujita's approach may also find interest among Lokator100's wider selection of Japanese Photobooks, or browse the broader Photography Books & Photobooks collection for related work in the medium.
