Arakinema: Blue Period/Last Summer, Nobuyoshi Araki, 2017

Arakinema documents a series of slide show performances that Nobuyoshi Araki staged with this assistants Nobuhiko Ansai and Shiro Tamiya in museums and institutions from the 1980–2000s In the performances, they selected and sequenced two slide carousels featuring a succession of images — one tinted blue, and the other tinted fuschia and yellow — fading into one another, accompanied by a musical soundtrack

The book was bound in a medium-sized landscape format with a white slipcaseText is typeset in large body copy in Helvetica BQ for English and Hiragino Sans for Japanese

After working on the image sequence and typesetting of the book’s interior pages for a year, the cover was designed lastFor the cover design, all text is tampon printed on the book’s top edge, fore edge, bottom edge and spine—the same text is also duplicated on the four edges of the slipcase

For the design proposal, we flew to Tokyo to meet with ArakiOn the day of the presentation, we waited in Bar Rouge, a bar he owned in Shinjuku to meet himExcept for a bartender and some staff, we were the only ones in the barAfter 3 hours, his manager told us that he wasn't feeling well and that he wouldn’t be able to meetThe approval for the project came a few weeks later after we emailed him the proposal