Izumi Hayashi - Z - 1996

Z

Izumi Hayashi
Takeshobo/1996/Japanese/190*270*15

Z, a collection of works by Japanese female photographer Izumi Hayashi, born in 1964, graduated from Yamawaki Gakuen Junior College and Tokyo College of Photography, and studied under Osamu Nagahama, one of Japan's leading photographers, before going independent. He worked mainly on documents and portraits for economic and men's magazines, and also organised an exhibition of photographs of Kenzo Kitakata in the 1990s. And this book, a collection of his work published in 1996, is based on the motif of hard gays in the USA. The soul of the female photographer who dived into this hard world, which probably does not exist in Japan, with only one body, is shaken, and the view of the world depicted in high contrast and close-ups overlaps with Hell's Angels, which Nagahama, who studied under him, collected in the 1960s and 1970s. The Unknown World Behind America. As stated in the recorded text by Ryu Murakami, some homosexuals, like Robert Mapplethorpe and others, have been affected by AIDS, and some of those pictured here may no longer exist in this world. Nevertheless, here is the drama of men who, along with their proud pride and loneliness, are moving towards their sexual desires.