‘Shiotani’ by Anders Edström turns family photographs into an epic chronicle
Launching next week at Claire de Rouen books, the book documents 23 years worth of visits by the Swedish photographer to the remote village of Shiotani
On the 9th of September, Claire de Rouen books are holding a launch for Shiotani, a new book of photography by acclaimed Swedish photographer Anders Edström. At 756 pages long, it is as much a chronicle of twenty-three years of family history as it is an artistic project.
Edström first visited the village of Shiotani, twenty-nine miles from Japan’s second city of Kyoto, in 1993 to meet his wife’s family. With his day job as a fashion photographer, it was inevitable that he would take the occasional picture- even if the occasional picture had snowballed into a collection of around 6,000 around fifteen years later. Although his visits were initially sporadic, a move to Tokyo in 2004 increased their regularity, though it wasn’t until 2008 that Edström realised the potential behind his collection, appropriately enough, while making up a photo album for his grandmother-in-law as a Christmas present.
Shiotani is a deeply family-centric book, capturing moments that might at first appear banal; family meals, busy tables and family day trips, take on a far larger significance when grouped together. As C.W. Winter writes in one of the accompanying essays in the book, ‘it is usually quite difficult to tell when one of Anders’ pictures has been taken. Images from 1992 look like ones from 2015, 1998, and 2011'. When discussing the book, Edström too noted the sense of, “slow change, a pace and energy quite different from my long-time residence in Tokyo. The village has a sense of isolation.”
With only forty-seven inhabitants, most dedicated to the traditional farming of mushrooms, rice and tea, it certainly does seem like a place out of time. Edström recounts how, when he first arrived in Shiotani, his mother-in-law was able to reminisce about her childhood when American troops marched through the village and handed her chocolate. Not many westerners had come to the village since then.
Yet neither the village, nor the book are static . Slowly and subtly, things modernise and people age. A central figure of the book and of the family, the grandmother, visibly ages throughout the book, and eventually passes away. The photographs of her funeral, where Edström’s daughter performs the traditional last rites, are a touching final memorial.
As Edström remarked ‘It’s also not about one picture; the sequence of pictures is so important for me, [and deciding] which ones go together.’ This story-like quality was so powerful that Shiotani can lay claim to inspiring not one, but two of Edström’s most recent artistic projects. The Works and Days (of Tayoko Shiojiri in the Shiotani Basin) is an eight-hour long film, dedicated to the life of Tayoko Shiojiri, Edström’s mother-in-law, and her dying husband across fourteen months. Filmed with C.W. Winter, with whom Edström has collaborated before, it won a Golden Bear at the 70th Berlin International Film Festival.
For more information about the launch on 9 September at Claire de Rouen, and to pre-order the book, please click here.
