Conceived while shooting his book New Dimension, in Vernacular Naoki Ishikawa shifts his focus from ancient cave paintings to the architectural patterns of native communities. Vernacular means local, native, and the building styles particular to a place. The starting point was a visit to the rock-shelter dwellings of southern France, houses merged with the limestone cliff at the back, which he photographed obsessively while waiting for permission to enter a cave. Once again he travelled far and wide, this time visiting France, Benin, Ethiopia, Peru, Bolivia and Canada. By examining the way the communities in these areas build their houses, Ishikawa finds a way to understand how a culture develops in relation to its own land, seeing houses as the physical, vernacular expression of how these cultures function. He noticed that people live in small groups at some distance from the state, keeping up old rituals and traditions, and he argues that such buildings are neither relics of the past nor products of poverty but at the forefront of the future. Yet the book is not just a catalogue of houses from around the world: while the houses are shot in a similar way, facing the viewer head-on, Ishikawa also shows a looser style in documenting the cultures themselves.