Family Diary

Issei Suda
Family Diary

Photographs: Issei Suda

Publisher: Chose commune

176 pages

Pictures: 80

Year: 2021

ISBN: 979-10-96383-26-9

Price: 35 €

Comments: Softcover with cloth and rivets, 15 x 23 cm, b&w photographs. First edition. In very good condition.

Issei Suda compulsively documents, with a great sense of humour, the daily life he shared with his daughter, wife, and dog.

Between 1991 and 1992, Issei Suda shot compulsively with a Minox camera, which is one of the smallest cameras there is. It is actually so small that it was commonly used for intelligence activities during the war. Issei Suda turned his lens towards the intimacy of his own home, documenting with a great sense of humour the daily life he shared with his daughter, wife and dog. The photographs presented in this book « Family Diary » — a title that Suda chose himself in the 1990s —, have never been published in book form before.

Issei Suda (born in Tokyo in 1940 and died in 2019), graduated from the Tokyo College of Photography. He initially worked as a photographer for the Tenjo Sajiki theater company, before becoming an independent photographer.
A photographer of everyday life, the instantaneous, the furtive and the snapshot, he teaches at Tokyo College of Photography and Zokei University in Tokyo, as well as at the Photography Department of Osaka University of the Arts.

For two years, I was constantly pressing the shutter on my Minox camera: the unique world of Minox had captivated me. I was focusing on urban landscapes at the time - Tokyo, Taiwan - but along the way, I found this eye shifting further and further toward my own home. Every day, my corneas - by way of a Minox lens - witnessed my family. My act of observation was simple, flipping through the calendar pages of an unremarkable day-to-day; but as I peered into the workings of my own private life, I acted as a member of the family while remaining an outsider.

I tend to think of photography as the centre of my life; and alongside it, the time spent with my family carries on. The Minox prints appear before me, with a rough, grainy texture that seems to banish these times into the past. My family, standing before my eyes, already begins to fade away. I feel a vague, uneasy foreboding, one that awakens the me of the present-day to reality.

- Issei Suda