Episode 7: A Day With Moe Suzuki

For this seventh episode of CC Stories, we’d like to take you on a day with Moe Suzuki. A Japanese photographer born in Tokyo, she studied photography at London College Communications, University of the Arts London. Upon returning to Tokyo after the Great Eastern Earthquake in 2011, Moe Suzuki taught herself book-binding skills and started a career as a visual artist, working primarily with photography, mixed with archival images and illustrations to tell narratives in book form.

When asked to describe the place where she lives, Moe Suzuki explains that she resides in Shitamachi, a neighbourhood located in the east of Tokyo, where the old pre-war townscapes are still visible, although they are gradually disappearing. The area used to be swamp land, which was reclaimed. The east side of Tokyo was completely lost in the Tokyo air raids of World War II, but only the triangular area where she lives barely survived the fire.

“My grandfather used to tell me about his experience of the Tokyo Air Raid. He said that he tried to prevent the spread of fire in his house by spreading bedding soaked in water on the roof! Anyway, because the area wasn’t burnt down, it was left behind in the post-war urban development, and there are side streets and winding roads that are impassable to cars. Still, after Covid, most of the old houses have been demolished, but you get the feeling that time has stood still a bit in the houses that barely remain. I like to stop and find these old signs and also update my memory (and sometimes photograph) which house is going to be demolished or gone already, you usually don’t remember what there used to be once they are demolished.”

Moe’s studio is a small room next to her bedroom which is often invaded by her cats. She works there mostly in the early morning because, in the evening, she spends time with her son. Generally, she goes out to shoot and research, but she always comes back there to reflect and edit what she gets.  Editing is a very important process in her work and probably what she loves the most.

She tells us that her day-to-day is very much looking the same, but as her son will soon start school, she imagines that her routine will change a bit because Japanese kids go to school by themselves.
Lately, she spends more time working on her own projects, assignments, or joining art book fairs because she created her own publishing house in 2023.

In 2021, her dummy book Sokohi won the 7th edition of the LUMA Rencontres Dummy Book Award Arles and the next year she chose Chose Commune to publish it.

“I guess the time I was working on Sokohi was the most intense, but looking back it was kind of a cornerstone of my creativity. I was laser cutting every single page of the artist’s edition of that book in that little room while my partner was seriously worried that I was going to burn the house down, and then it moved into the new phase of editing with Chose Commune.  It was the time of Covid and every time I got a new PDF from Cécile I would print it out to look at it. It was fascinating to learn how a photobook is edited, designed, printed and finally sent out into the world.”

In the past few weeks, Moe Suzuki has been preparing her latest exhibition, which is being held in the Fukuoka region of southern Japan:
SOKOHI, on display at Libris KOBACO until April 20, 2025.
Libris KOBACO, Otemon, 3 Chome−2−26 401, Chuo-ku, Fukuoka.

A few copies of her books are also still available on our website, head to www.chosecommune.com