Chloé Jafé - Okinawa Mon Amour
Published by the(M) editions
Book Cover
This year, I had the privilege of attending Les Rencontres d’Arles, a photography festival that spans the entire summer. During the festival's first week, a small French city is transformed into a multifaceted photography gallery. It was a grand and glorious experience.
I stopped by the Photo Book fair to browse through the books. There were books from dozens of book publishers who focused on photography. I must have looked through 30 or 40 books, but when I stopped at the(M) editions photo booth, I was immediately drawn to this book, which has a bright red cover and bold black French and Japanese text. Chloé Jafé’s Okinawa Mon Amour is the second book of a trilogy. The other two books in the trilogy are titled I give you my life and How I met Jiro.
Flipping through the pages, I was reminded of the early moments in my photographic journey when my obsession with photography books developed. As a young, broke twenty-something living in Chicago, I would visit the downtown Borders bookstore and spend hours flipping through photography books.
This book, as the title suggests, is about love. Specifically about the performance of love.
I had a book signed to me. I love Chloé’s signature.
The introduction text in the book reads:
In this photographic and sentimental wandering, the second chapter of her trilogy, the photographer paints a portrait with great accuracy of this island from the rest of Japan. In Okinawa, which was destroyed during WWII, time seems to have stopped.
Chloé Jafé commits to reveal the stigmata of a past that still binds the facades and faces and the dark corners of an island where pirates in distress and good-time ladies continue to flock.
Her work brings to light men and women ostracised from society who have established performance as a religion, unveiling their peculiarity in all its tenderness and its distress.
Jafe shares the multifaceted performance of love through people and places with the audience. The book's edit weaves through Intimate portraiture, noir cityscapes, archival images of soldiers printed on translucent paper, and love notes.
We can see the hand of the artist through the addition of red paint or what she calls the “stigmata of the past” to black-and-white photographs. I really enjoy this kind of documentary work, which expands the bounds of documentary practice with creative techniques usually reserved for more fine-art photographic practice.
After I asked to purchase a copy of the book, Jafe just happened to walk up to the booth where I was purchasing it. She had photographs in an exhibition space in Arles that weekend. She offered to sign the book for me, and I gladly accepted. She has one of the most unique book signatures I have seen. I would highly recommend picking up a copy.
Here more about Jafé on the podcast A Small Voice: Conversation With Photographers.