NŌTAN.

노탄. Photographs by Philip Perkis.

anmoc, South Korea, 2025. 228 pp.

SIGNED COPIES AVAILABLE!

Philip Perkis' last photo book

Philip Perkis, who has been a photographer for 75 years, became blind in one eye in 2007 and announced that he would stop photography at the end of 2021 when he could no longer work in a darkroom after his vision deteriorated. In 2019, he started a project to take and print one photo at the end of each day. 33 of those prints were published in NŌTAN.

"I was checking old films taken at various times in my life and making prints. After much thought and consultation with Cyrilla, I decided to take pictures every day with a small automatic camera (since I couldn't see the numbers anymore with Leica) and develop and print the film until the quality of the work deteriorated. Cyrila agreed to help. I expected one year, but in the end, it lasted for 16 months." — Philip Perkis

Park Tae-hee, a student who has made seven books of his teacher's photographs, starting with Photography Lecture Notes, planned a 15-week interview so that his teacher's interrupted photographic work would continue as a story.

NŌTAN is divided into three chapters: Preface, Dialogue, and Photographs and Stories and explains the unfamiliar title of NŌTAN in the Preface chapter.

"NŌTAN is a Japanese design concept that does not prevail in either subject or background, like the principle of yin and yang. Black is not more important than white, and white is less important than black. I also thought about the rake-shaped garden in Kyoto, but if something in the garden stands out as more "important" than anything else, it is a failure. When we look at ballet, especially in the Pads de Deux, I think that the shape between the bodies of the two dancers is just as important as the shape of their bodies themselves." — Philip Perkis

He goes on to say that he has been interested in the relationship between art and subject matter for a long time. He emphasizes that what is important in a photograph that has to be taken is not the 'what' but the tension created by the description of the 'what' and the abstraction. While his eyesight is deteriorating, he accepts his reality as a change, not a deterioration, and connects the meaning of the subject matter in photography to the concept of NŌTAN, which he discovered a long time ago. He concludes the preface with a quote from John Cage, "Nothing is unimportant" and thus summarizes the intention of the title in a short and powerful way.

Cat# ZK752H Hardbound [Signed] $100.00
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