Archive of affection, obsession ─ Ai Ezaki

A photobook reassembling ten years of lived experience through a collaboration that turns the making of the book itself into a form of self-reflection.

Archive of affection, obsession is a photobook by Japanese photographer Ai Ezaki, created by entrusting photographs taken over the course of roughly a decade to graphic designer Yuta Murao, whom Ezaki had never met before, and leaving the layout entirely in his hands. Through the act of making a photobook with another person, Ezaki attempts to grasp the contours of herself from a more objective distance. Across images of Tokyo’s cityscape, meals shared with friends and self-portraits, the book reconfigures a wide range of experiences and moments accumulated over ten years. It also includes “A Record of Devotion,” an essay in which Ezaki reflects on what it means to take photographs and to make a photobook.

Published at the turning point of the fifteenth year of her career, the book reaches beyond personal history to quietly register a broader shift in time. Holding close the fact that Tokyo and its everyday life in the 2010s have already passed, it carries the bittersweet yet lucid aftertaste of something gently being bid farewell.

Book Review
Part I: Fifteen Years of a Self That Belongs to No One — Ai Ezaki’s Archive of affection, obsession
by Yukihito Kono

Book Review
Part II: Rethinking “I-Photography” — Toward the “I” in an Age of Lost Names
by Yukihito Kono

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Title: Archive of affection, obsession
Artist: Ai Ezaki
Design: Yuta Murao
Publisher: Self-published, April 2025
Format: Softcover with dust jacket, PUR binding
Size: 180 × 251 mm
Pages: 160
Language: Japanese / English
Edition: Limited edition of 150 copies