Over the span of five years, photographer Sean Lotman traveled all over Japan’s many islands documenting the Far East archipelago not as it is at this present moment, but as a temporal reality fused with ethereal phenomena. His resulting photo book, Sunlanders, is thus not a historical document, but a surreal conception of society. It’s a way of mystifying banal stereotypes, slipping away into a parallel universe of vivid colors, standstill environments, and dreamy manifestations.
Through a process of defamiliarization, Lotman highlights Japanese alienation and self-concealment in radical form. At the same time, he exposes a certain spiritual resiliency imbuing Japanese life beyond the social gravity of despair, distraction, and ennui: that for all the cultural burdens inherent in society, there remains hope for the individual. Unique in its experimental burning and dodging techniques, all of the images from the book are scanned from handmade color darkroom prints, inspired by the Technicolor films of his childhood.
Sean Lotman, Sunlanders
Published by Bemojake
35£
