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Review: “Making a Map” by Wakaba Noda

image Recently, I posted about the Sweedish publisher Farewell Books and their latest publication entitled Making a Map, a selection of photographs by Japanese photographer Wakaba Noda. Mårten Lange, Farewell’s founder and editor, was kind enough send me a copy to take a closer look at. When I first opened Making a Map, I immediately thought of all of the self-published books that I’ve been seeing lately, books made using online custom printing services such as Lulu or Blurb. While printing this way may never compare to the precision and image quality of Steidl’s publications, I’ve been really quite impressed with a number of them. The exciting part of this technology being so accessible (and so affordable) now is that anyone with a book idea and basic design skills can produce a quality publication. This is a large part of Lange’s inspiration when he started Farewell in 2007.

Inspired by a digital do-it-yourself spirit, Farewell was created as a way of bypassing the barrier of exclusiveness that often surrounds photo book publishing. By printing small editions and using the Internet as the primary distribution channel, a Farewell book is both accessible and exclusive at the same time.
Farewell began with two books from Lange himself, Woodland and Machina, followed by John Divola’s As Far As I Could Get and Late Winter Early Spring by Magnus Gyllensten. Wakaba Noda’s Making a Map is the most recent book, Farewell’s fifth publication. The book itself is relatively small (approximately 16 x 21.3cm, 8.4 x 6.3in), softcover and perfect bound. It contains 32 pages, featuring 28 offset printed full color images and no accompanying text. Without a description of the project, Noda’s photographs feel very much open to interpretation. That said, there seems to be great care taken in the sequencing (and pairing) of the images. imagespread from Making a Map, 2008 © Wakaba Noda / Farewell Booksimagespread from Making a Map, 2008 © Wakaba Noda / Farewell Booksimagespread from Making a Map, 2008 © Wakaba Noda / Farewell Books The simplicity of design and lack of text is fitting for this work. I found myself easily entering Noda’s world: a majestic scene of grazing horses in the grass, a curious pattern found in the netting at what might be a baseball field or a driving range, a small glimpse of a rainbow at sunset. The subtle tonality of the photographs is consistent and makes moving from one image to another a pleasure. The format of the images, what seems to be a slightly elongated frame, somewhere in between the ratio of 35mm and a standard panoramic, is also nice. The photographs sometimes appear to be distant in location but are always close in feeling; with Making a Map, Noda weaves together small wonders that feel somehow insignificant and somehow profound and in doing so “makes a map of a world not defined by geography, but by the possibilities that photography offers.” If expensive printing is not the most important thing to you in a photo book, I highly recommend this collection of quietly considered photographs. Visit Farewell Books to purchase a copy.