With his photographs, the Japanese photographer Masahito Yamamoto has documented makeshift plywood assemblages installed to blockade entries to certain architectures or streets, and at some point started to call this phenomenon “tiger park.”

Yamamoto has taken those “tiger park” photographs through random encounters in his daily life or while traveling for work, without intentionally looking for them. With Tokyo, where he lives, as the main location, they have been also collected in various other cities throughout Japan and abroad.

As a deliberate choice, this book does not provide the shooting date and location of each photograph.

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［Artist comment］

In any city, you can find them here and there, as if filling small gaps between pieces of incomplete jigsaw puzzles.

They are like scabs that cover wounds of buildings and the city itself.

In relation to various materials in their surroundings, such as concrete, the grain of plywood looks as if sparkling radiantly.

When a thin plywood board blocks our incursion, our imagination about possible past events, sometimes triggered by some visible traces, starts to fill up the inner space behind it.

I would like to enter a tiger park one day, turning my camera from the space inside to the world outside.

A view with sunlight coming through tiny gaps between plywood boards might be good, too.

The resultant photograph might capture someone’s gaze, looking into the space through the gap, toward the camera.

Masahito Yamamoto, November 2017

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His “tiger park” photographs have been so far printed in two zines, lished by sosoup, a production and publishing label established by Yamamoto and the photographer Akiko Arai, his partner.

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In this book, each image is presented on a single A4 page, except for four big images on A3 sheets that penetrate through the book, from the first half to the second half, made possible because the main body is not bounded.

The laser printed surface of each page is so slippery that the main body might fall apart, but please recompose the pages as you wish.

There are no page numbers.

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Format: A4 / 297 x 210 mm

Number of pages: 100

Number of illustrations: 90

Printing: Color / high-quality laser printing

Binding: Scrum binding / enclosed in an OPP bag

Front cover: Transparent film / monochrome / laser printing

First edition: 300 copies

Price: 2700 yen + tax

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Design: Shin Akiyama + Atsushi Kurosaki / edition.nord

Production cooperation: Sun M Color

Printing: poncotan

Assembling: chiku chiku laboratory

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© 2017 Masahito Yamamoto

Courtesy of sosoup

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