SUPER LABO is proud to announce the release of the new book ”Collecting Summers" by Koji Onakai. Fewer and fewer times have I ventured out to places during the summer over these years. "It was in 1999 and I was 39 years old, feeling stagnant in both my career and life, when I quit taking black and white photographs and took up color film photography instead. Liberated from a kind of heavy seriousness of black and white photography, I came to feel more at ease releasing the shutter aimed at various subjects and scenes I had never photographed before in black and white. I was surprised at the quantity of information contained in color negatives. Moreover, an amazing discovery for me was that the sky, ocean, flowers, and grassy fields were represented so vividly on paper through the darkroom process. Feeling that this was a new beginning for my own photography, I started to travel to various places across Japan again carrying my bag filled with rolls of color film. Ashibetsu, Utashinai (Hokkaido); Kanita (Aomori), Kakunodate (Akita); Sanjo (Niigata); Iwai, Awakatsuyama, Onjuku (Chiba); Jogashima (Kanagawa); Saijo (Ehime); Katsurahama (Kochi); Suo-oshima (Yamaguchi); Fukue (Nagasaki); and Naha (Okinawa)..... This year, now 2017, as I sat in my cool, air-conditioned darkroom in the unbearable summer heat just before the end of the rainy season, I longed to see again the photographs of when color photography seemed so fresh to me. This is a book compiling those photographs, overflowing with the light of those summer days." Collecting Summers