Gengetsu

Takemi Yabuki's Gengetsu is a portrait project built on withholding: each subject, a stranger approached on the street and asked to pose, appears with part of their face or body cut from view.

Yabuki has described the method as a study of visibility and invisibility, of how much a photograph should be allowed to reveal. "You can see too much in photography," he has written of the series. "It is dangerous to be exposed to too much. This is just the right amount of expression to show reality." The book, published by Super Labo in 2015 as a 110-page hardcover with 52 images, was issued as a signed and numbered edition of 500 and was shown as an exhibition at Ai Kowada Gallery, Tokyo, the same year.

Yabuki (b. 1982) works primarily as a commercial photographer; Gengetsu, reviewed by curator Fumiko Nakamura of the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art as an image that seems to "jump out" of the book despite showing only a figure covered in black spots, is among his best-known independent series.