47 portraits chosen by Yoshihiko Ueda from the portrait work Kazumi Kurigami has made since he became an independent photographer in 1965: richly graded monochrome, dynamic movement, and subjects whose strong gaze at the lens is answered by a photographer who burns his own sensation onto the film. The book takes as its motto that a human face is a magnificent view, and presents the portrait not as a fragment of time cut off from reality but as a new life that goes on forever. For Kurigami portraiture is the fruit of daily training of the eye and also a challenge whose outcome neither he nor the model can foresee. In his essay on the pictures of unordinary people, Kotaro Iizawa notes that these are undoubtedly orthodox works yet have a unique texture and a rarely seen working of consciousness: seen in large numbers, they reveal a singularity that makes them unmistakably Kurigami's portraits.