Paul Kooiker, TOKYO, 2017

Dutch artist Paul Kooiker’s photobook ‘Tokyo’ (published by Japan-based Artbeat publishers) is based on a single photo session Kooiker held during a brief stay in Tokyo in 2015.
Kooiker then adjusted the image to a square format that put the focus on the model’s behind and experimented with various digital image manipulation techniques. 106 thusly altered images were selected for to make up the Tokyo series.

“The book presents the widest array of possible variations on a theme. […] Kooiker pushed photography to its very outer limits. The resulting images might resemble the art of painting, but in the end it amounts to neither painting nor photography. Kooiker has travelled the dual track of image abstraction and obsessive repetition of a single digital cliché, thereby permitting himself ultimate freedom.”