Born in Hiroshima, Japan, Yojiro Imasaka lives and works in New York City. He received his BFA in photography at Nihon University College of Art in Tokyo, Japan and his MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York. In the summer of 2013 - traveling alone by car with camping equipment - Imasaka began his two-month road trip across the United States, and he documented it. Imasaka exposes a mysterious beauty within ordinary scenes in American landscape. 
 

STUDIO NEWWORK was assigned to design his first monograph, USA (Untitled Scapes of America). It was published in conjunction with his solo exhibition; Sleeping Beauty at Miyako Yoshinaga gallery, and the exhibition is being held from April 17th to May 24th, 2014. This book consists of a combination of color and black-and-white photographs of his 35mm film prints and his 8 x10" large format film prints. We also designed an invitation card for the exhibition.

 

The image on the front cover wraps around to another panel of French-fold cover. It is designed to show only a part of the image abstractly at first glance, and it denotes the beginning of his cross-country trip. The publication design is a modern take on classic Americana. Inspired by natural classic American color schemes, the fresh modern color palette (muted sage green / slate grey / sky blue) are carefully selected to match with beautiful photographs of America seen with a Japanese sensibility. Printed on high quality uncoated paper that has a delicate and classic feel, this, in fact, is based on modern asymmetric 12-column layout in near-square format. Short description texts in spreads which are center-aligned in the middle of 2 columns give a classic yet contemporary look, while introductory paragraphs are left-aligned for the ease for reading.