Hanon

Yoshinori Mizutani photographs the great cormorants that have colonised the skies over suburban Tokyo, and lets them arrange themselves into something that reads less like a bird book than like a page of music.

Hanon was published by amana in Tokyo in 2016, the fourth of Mizutani's books with the imprint, and takes its title from Charles-Louis Hanon's nineteenth-century piano studies, The Virtuoso Pianist in Sixty Exercises. Shot in colour but reproduced so close to monochrome that it registers as black on white, the series flattens the city's power lines and steel lattice towers into a field with no perspectival depth, across which the birds sit strung out like notes on a stave. Sixty-four pages, softcover, 26 x 36 cm; the work was shown the same year in a solo exhibition at IMA CONCEPT STORE in Roppongi.

Mizutani came to attention with Tokyo Parrots (2014), his record of the feral parakeets nesting in the city, and Hanon extends that project's central interest: an expanding bird population read as a graphic incident in the urban fabric. amana published four of his books in three years — Tokyo Parrots, Colors and Yusurika before this one — followed by HDR_nature in 2018.