Clubs & Courts. Yokosuka Yokohama

Book measures 9 x 10.75 inches. Softcover in thick French-fold wrappers, in thin printed cardboard slipcase. Book consists of 77 B&W plates, with a short text about the work by the artist at the end of the text printed in Japanese and English translation. 

The images in this book consists of grainy, evocative photographs taken in decaying amusement bars, entertainment clubs and other seedy places in Yokosuka and Yokohama. Shot in the 1970s and 1980s, Ishiuchi captures the lost glamour, the alluring air of the forbidden, the smell of sex but also the exploitation, horror and desperation of the post-war period that kept lingering somewhere within these ruins. 

“In 1966, invited by a friend who was engaged to an American soldier, I visited the EM Club for the first time. The EM Club was an establishment that one could not enter unless accompanied by someone from the U.S. military. The three of us watched a movie, played the slot machines, and ate pizza at the restaurant. Despite the fact that I don’t remember what movie we saw, I do remember well the footage that showed just prior to the movie. The image which stirred such unease in me that it quite disturbed me was of the American flag, filling the entire screen, rippling. When the music began, the audience stood and saluted the screen.
Lately, I’ve begun to feel that the distaste I felt then, along with an awkwardness which was a new sensation to me, melded together in a mass of images and perhaps formed the energy that propelled me toward photography.”
― from Miyakoi Ishiuchi’s afterword 

A clean crisp copy in bright wrappers. Near Fine