I recently spent about an hour in front of the photobook shelves at a Tsutaya bookstore. I want to write down what I thought there before I forget. My idea is simple. What photobooks are missing is browsing.
What I was doing was simple. I pulled a book from the shelf, flipped through it, and if nothing struck me, I closed it and put it back right away. I repeated this for an hour. Along the way, I found three books I thought were really good: Yoshiyuki Okuyama's Pocari Sweat, Rinko Kawauchi's Utatane, and a photobook by Mark Steinmetz. In the end I didn't buy a single one, yet somehow I went home satisfied. That feeling of being fulfilled without buying anything stayed with me. To put the conclusion first: what I got in that hour was not a book, but the browsing itself.
By "browsing" I don't only mean flipping through books in a bookstore. I mean a place where you can come across, by chance, a single photograph before you fall for it. From here on, I use the word in this sense.
In my first piece here, I wrote that hearing the story and feelings behind a work makes it far more captivating. What I realized this time is that there is one more step before that. My way into a photobook is always a single photograph. Some books leave me cold after dozens of pages; others grab me within a few. With art photography, it takes a long time to put into words what is good about it. But the instinct that "something about this photograph is good" comes in an instant. Only after that do I read the photographer's biography or afterword, and that is when the work becomes far more captivating. In short, the background really works only after you have met that one photograph by browsing.
For example, Joel Meyerowitz's Wild Flowers includes a photograph of a sidewalk in New York. In the foreground is the back of a man in a reddish-brown jacket, and over his shoulder a large bunch of red flowers and a bunch of yellow flowers are carried through the crowd. Right beside the flowers, a woman with white tape on her nose, in a red cardigan and a checked shirt, walks toward the camera carrying a white paper bag. Behind her, a clear sky and skyscrapers open up. Honestly, I still can't explain well what is good about this photograph (ha). Is it the pairing of the flowers and the tape on her nose? Or that an ordinary crowd looks, just for a moment, like a stage? All I know for sure is that when I first saw it, I thought, "This is it." I only looked up who Meyerowitz was after that.
So where did I meet Meyerowitz? In a feature in the magazine &Premium, which I read on Kindle Unlimited. I came across him in a magazine I happened to open on a monthly all-you-can-read service, so this was paid browsing. Come to think of it, I do the same with music. I've paid for Spotify for about three years, and what I'm paying for is less the right to listen to artists I love than the right to stumble on songs I don't know. Paying 2,000 yen to visit an art museum is, since I can't take the works home, just an entrance fee for browsing. So browsing comes in two forms. One is like a bookstore: the encounter itself is free, and money changes hands only when you fall for something. The other is like Spotify or a reading subscription: you pay a monthly fee for the browsing itself. What fulfilled me in that hour at Tsutaya was using the first kind, for free, for an hour.
And here is the main point. Photobooks have almost none of this browsing. Photobooks are printed in very small numbers; runs of 300 or 400 copies are common. That limits the bookstores that carry them, and many people living outside big cities or abroad never even learn that a book exists. I have also never used paid browsing for photobooks, something like a "Spotify for photobooks."
But this is not only a problem for people far from big cities. I live within reach of bookstores with good photobook selections. Even so, my chances of finding a good one by browsing are very limited. What's on the shelves is only a tiny part of the photobooks in the world. Whether the one book I happen to pick up turns out to be good is mostly luck. The three books this time were just that day's luck. In short, browsing for photobooks is left entirely to where you live and how lucky you are that day.
For someone who has fallen for a book while browsing, the maker's story is the best push to buy. That's how I have bought photobooks myself. That is exactly why the problem is that the browsing that comes before it is left to place and luck. Photographs can cross borders, yet browsing is tied to your address. No matter how good the story, if you never meet that first photograph, the story never reaches you. So what we need to think about now is how to create browsing. And would people pay for it? If they would, is it a free entrance like a bookstore, or a monthly one like Spotify? I plan to keep thinking about this question for a while.
This piece was first published in Japanese on note on October 7, 2026.