from the publisher : “These photographs make me shudder with fear. This is because I am a non-swimmer, and I imagine it is scenes like this that I might witness at the moment before my head finally goes under the water. One final look at the world. We are surrounded by water and land, and much of the history of landscape photography has used these two familiar ideas as a starting point. Yet I have never seen these two components put together in such a compelling way.” (From the introduction by Martin Parr) "Half Awake and Half Asleep in the Water" is the second title in our “Parr/Nazraeli Edition of Ten,” and our first monograph on the work of Asako Narahashi. This series has been exhibited in Japan to wide acclaim, but never published in book form until now. The photographs were made while the artist stood chest-deep in the ocean facing the shoreline; through them, she manages to extract the viewer’s mind from its surroundings, and one finally succumbs to the hallucinatory power of the ocean. In the words of esteemed photographic historian Kotaro Iizawa, “the feeling of being stranded, however, is strangely comforting.”