What's this? Book review of Shotaro Akiyama's photo book.

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Impressions: Portraits of Japanese actresses is what Akiyama is most famous for. He has long been a glamour and celebrity photographer. This collection of black and white portraits are important because they capture the actresses when they were young.

Their youth (or younger days) is immortalized in these great portraits. Ruriko Asaoka, Sayuri Yoshinaga, Ayumi Ishida, Shima Iwashita, Reiko Ohara, Mariko Kaga, Fubuki Koshiji, Rumiko Koyanagi, Gypsy Rose, Yoko Nogiwa, Chieko Baisho, Mie Hama (a 007 Bond girl), Setsuko Hara, Keiko Matsuzaka, Yoshiko Mita, Yamamoto Linda, and a bevy of other actresses, many of them before my time. Some 159 actresses are featured in 230 portraits. Many have only one portrait in the book, and others have more than one portrait.

Out of any group of women, there's always that special one. For Shotaro Akiyama, she was Setsuko Hara (b. 1920) who was the same age as him and the most famous actress of her time. Next to her portraits in the book, he writes a short, poignant essay describing how she was the first girl he (at age 16) fell in love with and how he (as a movie magazine photographer) miraculously got her permission to photograph her at her home 10 years later at age 26.

Most of the portraits were taken in the studio and so the lighting was controlled very well to produce dramatic lighting or dimensional effects. Each photo is captioned with the actress's name in Japanese (no English). At the end of the book, there are reflective writings by Akiyama and brief bios of all the actresses featured in the book. Unfortunately, nothing is in English. (Reviewed by Philbert Ono)

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