Nagisa Hotel

Nagisa Hotel collects photographs Hajime Sawatari made in 1963 and 1964 of his girlfriend at seaside hotels in Zushi and Shinagawa and on Chigasaki Beach, work he hoped at the time to place in the magazine Camera Mainichi and that went unpublished for half a century.

The book gathers twenty images, fifteen in black and white and five in color, printed in doubletone and full-color offset and bound as a hand-sewn softcover. Super Labo issued it in 2015 in an edition of 800 copies split between two cover variants of 400 each.

Sawatari studied photography at Nihon University's College of Art and worked in fashion, advertising, and nude photography. He won the Japan Photograph Association's Annual Award in 1973 for Nadia, which documents his relationship with the Italian model Nadia Galli, and later prizes for Alice from the Sea and Taste of Honey. Nagisa Hotel predates all three, showing the young photographer working in the same diaristic register a decade before those books made his name.