What's this? Book review of IZIMA (IJIMA) Kaoru's photo book.

Impressions: Izima-san has been pursuing the meaning of human beauty in the unconventional sense since the 1990s. His corpse series featuring Japanese actresses posed as a corpse in fashionable clothing aimed to show that even a corpse can be beautiful.

With Colored Beauty, he shows that people can be beautiful even in different candy colors. Imagine if the human race was composed of people having 20 or 30 different skin colors. Would racial prejudice be worse or better than now and how would it affect the fashion industry trying to make clothes for all these different skins? It really is an intriguing thought.

And what if the Japanese race were composed of green, blue, and red-skinned people? Well, that's what you see in this book. The people do look beautiful, but it's less due to the skin color and more to the way they are posed and photographed. It proves to me that human beauty is not dependent on skin color.

The fashion items the models wear also complement their skin color and vice versa. One model named Makiko is nude and red-skinned from the waist up. From the waist down, she wears a pair of blue jeans. Karen Kirishima is also red-skinned wearing a blue blouse and blue-jean shorts. Adding to the color complements is the plain, solid-color background paper in the photo studio.

Almost all the photographs were taken in the studio with perfect studio lighting. But there is one model with green skin who was photographed in the street among ordinary people. She is also ordering something at a fast food restaurant with the girl taking the order looking oblivious. A touch of humor in the book.

It should be mentioned that the skin colors are not just everyday colors. They are pretty exotic with names such as mahogany, strawberry, nutmeg, lilac, rose pink, cherry (the girl on the book's cover), and lemon (the model above). The color was applied by make-up artist TAKANO Masako who also writes about why she chose a particular skin color for each model.

Some of the photos also appeared on the cover of "zyappu (jap)" magazine that Izima started. He also held a "Colored Beauty" photo exhibition in Shinjuku in 1996 which I happened to see. The photos were printed on huge billboards. They were really eye-catching and impressive.

Since the publisher of this book has gone bankrupt, bookstores do not sell this book. However, Izima-san has made his extra copies of this book available for sale by PhotoGuide Japan. (Reviewed by Philbert Ono)

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What's this? Book review of IZIMA Kaoru's photo book.

Impressions: Wearing a stocking over the head is another unconventional possibility of looking beautiful, according to IZIMA KAORU.

This book is a collection of B/W studio portraits of model and actress Karen Kirishima, born to an American father and Japanese mother. The photos were originally shot for a fashion magazine called MR High Fashion. Although Izima could only publish a few of the photos for the magazine, he felt compelled to publish all 450 photos (even the three defective ones) in this book. He was elated by Karen's cooperation in posing in absurd ways. The photos were taken in a single photo shoot in Nov. 1991. Karen later posed for Izima-san a few more times for other projects.

Since you see all the pictures he took, there are slight variations of the same shot or pose. She wears a variety of different stockings on her head, and the stocking usually distorts her face, sometimes to an extreme degree. Some shots might remind you of a bank robber wearing a stocking as a disguise.

The book gives almost no explanation of Izima's ideas behind the photographs. But you can surmise that he thinks that this is or can be human beauty, distorted face and all. It's hard for me to say that a woman would look beautiful with a stocking over her face. It reminds me too much of that bank robber in the movies. But the way Izima-san did it, you could call it art. Sculpture is probably more accurate. He used stockings and a human face to create a living sculpture that he photographed.

Since the publisher of this book has gone bankrupt, bookstores do not sell this book. However, Izima-san has made his extra copies of this book available for sale by PhotoGuide Japan. (Reviewed by Philbert Ono)

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