Wandering Dog — Mai Nakama, Graf Publishers, 2024
Wandering Dog is a hardcover photobook published by Graf Publishers in 2024 in a limited edition of 300 copies. The work is grounded in black-and-white photography and moves through themes of life, death, and transience as observed in a rural Japanese town. Its opening sequence — centred on the death of a cow — establishes a register that the book sustains across 43 photographs: close attention to animals, land, and the rhythms of everyday existence.
Nakama's visual method is precise rather than lyrical. She works with close-ups and stark compositions, using the contrast between light and dark not as atmosphere but as structure. The 56-page sequence alternates between proximity and distance, between the particular and the general, without resolving into sentiment. The book does not editorialize its subject matter; it observes it.
As a physical object, Wandering Dog is contained and deliberate — 56 pages, 43 photographs, hardcover binding, issued in an edition of 300. Graf Publishers, an independent Japanese publisher, has produced the book with the material restraint the work demands. The edition is not numbered in the source data, and no ISBN has been confirmed.
For buyers interested in Japanese contemporary photography and the photobook as a form, this title sits within a wider field available through our Photography & Photobooks collection at Lokator100.
About the Photographer
Mai Nakama (b. 1987, Yamaguchi; lives and works in Tokyo) is a Japanese photographer whose practice centres on memory, everyday life, and the boundaries between presence and absence. Her work has been shown at Nikon Salon (Tokyo, Osaka, Shinjuku), Book Marute, Gallery Kaido, and Das Japanische Haus in Germany.
Her photographs are held in the collection of the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts. In 2021 she received the 1Wall Kohara Encouragement Award. Wandering Dog continues the black-and-white, narrative-rooted approach that defines her broader body of work.
