Tomoko Sawada
To Be Bewitched by a Fox
Limited Edition

Tomoko Sawada won the 2000 Canon New Cosmos of Photography Excellence Award for ID400 (1998), her college senior project and de facto debut work. This was followed by the Kimura Ihei Award in 2003 and the ICP (International Center of Photography) Infinity Young Photographer Award in 2004, among other examples of the critical acclaim she has received and continues to receive today from around the globe. In March 2021 To Be Bewitched by a Fox, her first major solo show at a public art institution, opened at the Tokyo Photographic Art Museum; this book is the complete and limited edition of the catalogue and companion volume to that exhibition.

 

The exhibition featured photographs from thirteen past bodies of work—including ID400; Sawada’s most recent series, Reflection; and her earliest self-portrait, shown publicly here for the first time—recompiled by the artist into a new series titled To Be Bewitched by a Fox. The book includes every one of those photographs, nearly 1,400 in all. With a layout of one work per page plus extensive text, that makes for a hefty total of 1,552 pages.

 

Spanning more than ten centimeters at the spine and much too thick to bind by machine, each copy has been sewn together one by one by hand. The result is a book that is more than just a book, but a work of art in itself. Indeed, the artistry extends to the specially constructed storage box: Sawada’s bewitching world begins even before you open the pages from the moment you place your hands on the box to raise the lid.

 

Each copy also includes one signed 1 of 1 original print from the hundred works in the Reflection series.

 

Limited edition of 100 copies

Custom storage box

One signed original print per copy from the Reflection series (100 prints total, limited edition of 1 each)

original print list