The photobook White Map on the Silk Road, published on the occasion of the eponymous November 2019 exhibition at the Irie Taikichi Memorial Museum of Photography Nara City, comprises photographs taken during several of Arata Dodo’s journeys — including Taigan (winner of the 38th Kimura Ihei Prize), Ways of Shanghai (winner of the Photographic Society of Japan Award) and his latest series Ulaanbaatar.

Dodo is a traveller, a journeyman with a keen eye for the many shapes that daily human life can take around the world. His photos are taken without distance to his subjects, and rather than searching for an elusive “other”, it is the wondrous sights emerging from the many ways we humans organize our lives around the world.

Within the pages of Dodo’s White Map on the Silk Road, differences become gradations and everyday sights turn into revealing artifacts of a rich, multifaceted world.