Production is complete. Koya Bound is now shipping.
Purchase over on Gumroad.
Some shots from production in Japan:
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The Book
In March of this year, Dan Rubin and I went on a walk.
The walk was along Japan's 1,000+ year old Kumano Kodo pilgrimage path. From that, we made a book.
The 1,000 copy edition of the book will be offset printed and bound in Japan on archival Japanese paper.
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The specs:
- Koya Bound is bound in linen that feels soft in the hand, and the images are printed on archival Japanese paper
- Printed and bound in Japan
- The cover and spine will be debossed with the title.
- The trim size is 320mm x 290mm
- The book is 84 pages long.
- It also includes a topographic map of our walking route.
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The content:
- Koya Bound is a book of photographs from the Kumano Kodo pilgrimage walk in Japan.
- It's a book of photographs about mountain time, and towering cedar time, and crumpled earth time, and ancient teahouse time.
- It's a book of photographs about where the mind wanders when disconnected.
- But, really, it's a book of photographs about adventures and curiosities often nearer to you than you may realize.
- Koya Bound will ship by December.
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WHO ARE YOU GUYS?
Dan Rubin is an award winning photographer and designer who frequently leads photography workshops around the world (most recently in the Faroe Islands), has worked with American Express, Ducati, Google, Land Rover, RedBull (and many more), and was once Creative Director for MOO.COM, among other Google-able things. You can view his recent photographic work on instagram.com/danrubin.
Craig Mod (me!) is a writer and photographer and award winning book designer who has produced over a dozen cloth-bound, silk-screened, foil-stamped books of all types, mostly in Japan. I also have a long history with Kickstarter. In fact, I ran one of the earliest successful book campaigns on Kickstarter six and a half years ago. You can read about that on my website. I'm also on Instagram: instagram.com/craigmod.
ABOUT THE WALK
The Kumano Kodo is only one of two UNESCO World Heritage pilgrimage walks. (The other World Heritage pilgrimage walk is the Camino de Santiago in Spain.)
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Dan and I (and another friend, Matt) began walking from a town in Wakayama Prefecture called Takijiri, traveling along what is called the “naka hechi” route. We then turned north to follow the “ko hechi” route to the birthplace of Shingon Buddhism: Mt. Koya.
(That's why the book is called Koya Bound.)
It took eight days. We walked about 107 km.
Not too long, but long enough. Not too far, but far enough.
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Koya Bound is an artifact from this long, quiet walk in the woods.
It shows you snippets of where we went and what it felt like, but doesn't tell you (exactly) how to get there.
You can think of it as a sequence of visual hints. It says: There is a place in the world that looks and feels like this. Given a little gumption, similar places can probably be found near wherever you may be.
We believe that a good walk begins with a clear goal — a mountaintop, a far-off village, a superb pizza shack in the middle of the woods — but that a great walk is born out of a bit of circuity and a little uncertainty.
As we walked, we shot three thousand photographs using a Leica Q and a Leica M Monochrom.
We used these cameras because we love them. They are remarkable tools, but also feel like good friends.
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After completing the walk, Dan and I hid in an old Japanese house in the middle of the Gifu Prefecture for a week.
We subsided mainly on rice crackers.
And burned liters of kerosene each day trying to stay warm.
It was great.
We used a cheap Brother laser printer to print out hundreds of our photographs. We covered the floors in them.
I don't believe you can understand a book until you've printed it out and put it on the floor.
We walked all over the images, moved them around, and lived atop them for days. Finally, we edited them down to the fifty-seven that best told the story we wanted to tell.
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WHY WALK?
My interest in Japanese pilgrimage walks (and more generally, walks in Japan) began three years ago. I've now done about twelve such walks, and have spent nearly six months in total up in the mountains.
My time in Tokyo spans nearly fifteen years. I've gone on the occasional countryside trip (for example, when I was twenty I hitchhiked across the country for a month — an adventure chockablock with generous people and a little too much alcohol; stories for another day), but had never connected with (nor had I been really aware of!) the historical paths criss-crossing the archipelago. It wasn't until 2013, when John McBride — Japan scholar, art historian, and walking guru — invited me on my first walk, that I realized there existed just a train ride away a universe I had long ignored.
Since then I've scheduled at least one decent sized walk every six months (the next one is at the end of this October), and I usually cap off the end of each year with a smaller New Year's walk.
These walks have served as a way for me to invite to Japan people whose work or life inspires me, to spend a few days or weeks together, to get off the grid, and slow down in the old forests.
There's a special rhythm to walking in Japan, made possible in part by the vast transportation infrastructure and ecosystem of lodgings and hot springs. The day unfolds: You wake at dawn, eat a big breakfast, take some rice balls from the inn for the road, and then you spend the next eight to ten hours in the woods, cresting mountain passes, tip-toeing around snakes, singing away bears, finally arriving at your next inn or hut or home or hot spring. You bathe your weary bones in scalding hot water, eat a generous dinner, and then slip into futons by 8 p.m. It's a damn fine way to walk the world with good friends. And the kind of schedule that permits a type of chatter not present in the everyday day-to-day.
Dan Rubin and I had been trying to make a book together for almost five years. Finally, this past March, our timing aligned and we were able to head out on our Kumano Kodo walk. We didn't quite know what the shape of the final book would be, but we knew the walk was special, and that somewhere in the jumble of our images was a good story, or a good sequence, that both helped us remember those rhythms of a walking life, and would (we hope) inspire others to seek out similar adventures.
Thanks for your support. We look forward to sharing this little adventure with you.
— Craig & Dan
Thanks
For helping us get this project this far, many thanks to the following people: John McBride, Akiko Moriguchi, Chiaki Hayashi, Matt Jacobson, Chris Cox, David Cady, Derek Baines, Matt Mullenweg, Om Malik, Kevin Kelly, Jason Kottke, Frank Chimero, John Pull, Gail & George Musgrave, Laura Schmalstieg, Bryan Mochizuki, Chris Palmieri, Ashley Rawlings, Brie the Dog, Tanabe City, Victoria Wright.
The audio track for our video was recorded at Sweetwater Studios by Mark Hornsby (recording engineer) and Nick D'Virgilio (drums). We dig it!
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