Walk while ye have the light

Walk while ye have the light — Yoshiichi Hara, Sokyusha, 2011

Published by Sokyusha in 2011, Walk while ye have the light is the follow-up to Hara's 2008 photobook Dark of True. It extends his sustained investigation into the unstable boundary between truth and falsehood — a territory he treats not as metaphor but as photographic fact.

The title is drawn from John 12:35: "Walk while ye have the light, lest darkness come upon you." Hara takes this as both subject and method. Across 63 photographs on 68 pages, he records night streets, rainy riverbanks, glistening pavements, and fragmentary bodies. Light refracts through water, blurs edges, and dissolves the familiar into something closer to memory than documentation. The images resist fixed time — they seem to occupy past, present, and a possible future simultaneously.

The 260 × 232 mm hardcover is printed entirely in monochrome. Its physical restraint is consistent with the work's tone: nothing is embellished. The book has become difficult to source and is frequently listed as out of stock by dealers, making it a sought-after title among collectors of Japanese photobooks and those following Hara's output from Mandala Zukan and Fubaika through to Stripper Zukan and Dark of True.

For those building a considered collection in Photography & Photobooks, this title represents one of Hara's most fully realized later statements — quieter in register than his earlier erotic work, but no less precise in its attention.