UKIYO

Artist book, in collaboration with John L. Tran

A5 format, 32 pages. Book design: Franziska Nast. Concept and idea: Verena Issel. Photography: John L. Tran and Verena Issel. Published with the support of Hamburger Kulturbehörde, 2016.

Photographs of a brothel in Yokohama, Japan, abandoned 20 years ago and untouched ever since. The images are overlaid with lottery scratch-off ink, printed with the life stories of the prostitutes who once worked there. In order to see the photographs, the viewer must scratch away the personal histories.

The life stories of Japanese sex workers, collected for the exhibition HIDDEN AGENDA, formed the basis for the publication UKIYO.

For this book, documentary-style photographs of a brothel in Yokohama—hastily abandoned in the 1990s due to forced eviction—were combined with personal narratives. During my research into the lives of former prostitutes in the area, I became acquainted with several of the women. One of them eventually led me to a very special place: the old brothel where she had once worked.

In the 1990s, the brothel had been forcibly cleared, and those working there had fled in fear of both the police and the yakuza. Due to an ongoing dispute over ownership of the building, it has remained untouched ever since. Like a time capsule, everything inside has been preserved exactly as it was at the moment of their flight. My acquaintance still had her old key and secretly allowed me to photograph the interior.

For UKIYO, I combined these photographs with the life stories of women from Yokohama. The images were printed first, then covered with lottery-style scratch-off ink, and finally overprinted with the personal narratives of the women who had once worked there.

To view the images, the reader must physically scratch off the stories using a coin. One must choose: what do you want to see, and what do you want to know?