Membrane

Membrane is the first photobook by Karen Sato, published by Akaaka Art Publishing in May 2026. It gathers photographs she took over fifteen years, starting in 2009.

The story behind the book

The book starts from a question about the act of seeing. Looking at herself from a distance, Sato asks how the world and the self connect, and what kind of image forms between them. She turns not only to what is visible, but also to unseen images and the layers of memory.

Photographs become fragments, laid over one another or peeled away, and new images are born. The title means a membrane, a thin layer between things. In his essay, the critic Minoru Shimizu writes that these empty everyday scenes, photographs of photographs and still lifes do not carry unease, but a quiet ease and nostalgia, like old tools and things left behind.

What is in the book

• Photographs taken over fifteen years
• Essay by Minoru Shimizu
• 88 pages, hardcover with Swiss binding, 267 × 222 mm
• Designed by Yuri Suyama

About Karen Sato

Born in 1983 in Kanagawa, Japan. In 2010 she won the Grand Prize of Canon's New Cosmos of Photography. She has held solo exhibitions at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum, Sendai Mediatheque and elsewhere.