Portrait of J
Takashi Homma's survey of the Japanese people, 111 portraits made between 2002 and 2025, published by Dashwood Books and Session Press in New York in September 2025 as his first portrait monograph for an international audience.
The sitters span every generation and run from Homma's own mentors, the architect Arata Isozaki and the Provoke co-founder Takuma Nakahira, through Daido Moriyama, Yurie Nagashima and Haruki Murakami, to friends' children, who Homma says carry the same weight in the book as the famous. The architect Kazuyo Sejima is on the cover. Each person is photographed where they are, unposed and unstaged, in the lineage of Sander's Face of Our Time, Penn's Small Trades and Tillmans's Portraits. Writing in Conscientious, Jörg Colberg read the absence of salarymen as the point: the book is a picture of Japan's creative margin rather than of the country at large. The title borrows from a 1982 John Williams guitar record. Designed by Gilles Gavillet of Gavillet & Cie and printed by Musumeci in Italy, the book is a 232-page clothbound hardcover at 20 by 28 cm, with text in Japanese and English. A signed special edition of 50 came with a print.
Takashi Homma (b. 1962, Tokyo) left Nihon University in 1984 for agency work and came to notice with Tokyo Suburbia (1998), which won the Kimura Ihei Award. His books include Tokyo (Aperture, 2008), The Narcissistic City and Trails (MACK), and the mushroom series; the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum gave him the retrospective Revolution 9 in 2023. The library also holds his Portrait (Heibonsha, 2013) and Scandinavian Mushroom.
