About Inlet Books

Inlet Books is the publishing and bookshop imprint dedicated to the work of Japanese photographer Osamu Matsuo.

Matsuo was born and raised in Sasebo, a city on the western edge of Japan — a base town home to a U.S. naval base, and a shipbuilding town that helped drive the country's postwar economic boom. While working as a commercial photographer in Tokyo, he has kept returning to his hometown, making photobooks that record the people who live there and its landscapes.

From the ongoing Sasebo Project, which documents the city from many angles, to On Photography, a work that questions the nature of the medium itself, his practice circles steadily around two things: the photograph, and the human heart that longs to hold on to what it sees.

Named after the small inlets that notch the calm coastline of Sasebo, this imprint is a small window through which these books, having left the artist's hands, are sent out into the world to find their readers.


Osamu Matsuo 
photographer
1970  Born in Sasebo, Japan.
Lives and works in Tokyo. Studied at Nihon University College of Art,Department of Photography.

Photobooks
2008 "Other People's Album" (Sanctuary Publishing) 
2012 "On Photography" (Plancton) 
2014 "Hills and Crane" (STUH)
2015 "Someone's Idol"  (STUH)
2016 "HEAVY METAL "  (STUH)
2018 "17"  (STUH)
2026 "Other Shore" (CLOCK Inc.)

Essays
2020 "What are you looking at from inside the photograph" (NEUTRAL COLORS) 
2025 "What are you looking at from inside the photograph [New Edition]" (NEUTRAL COLORS)