Name: Martin Parr. Japonais endormis. Galerie du Jour Agnès B., 1998.
Availability: InStock

Published in 1998 by Éditions de la Galerie du Jour Agnès B. in Paris, Japonais endormis (Nemuru Nihonjin, 眠る日本人) is a small and largely overlooked Martin Parr book that has aged into one of his sharper ones. The work gathers a series of portraits Parr made on the Tokyo metro across the 1990s, photographing commuters who had fallen asleep on their journey. The book was produced to coincide with an exhibition of the same name at the Galerie du Jour in Paris, the gallery agnès b. founded in 1984 as a working space for contemporary photographers and artists. The premise inverts the standard image of late-twentieth-century Japan as hyperstressed and overcrowded. Parr isolates each sleeping figure from the carriage, frames them tightly, and lets the colour, the postures, and the abandon do the work. The result moves between tender and unsettling. There is also the question the book quietly poses, in line with the rest of Parr's practice, of whether people who look like they are sleeping are in fact sleeping at all. Approximately 96 pages, softcover, 17 by 23 cm, oblong format, roughly 50 colour photographs throughout. Text in French. ISBN 9782906496293. Sourced for MIG by Paris Image Unlimited as part of a thirty-three-title curation of rare art, photography, and design books. A reference for anyone tracking Parr's lesser-published Japan work, the Galerie du Jour publishing line, or the late-1990s European photobook before it became a commodified format.