Hiro, Mon Amour

Born in Zurich in 1954, the multimedia artist Michel Comte studied in France and England, and began his career in art restoration, specializing in contemporary art; his restoration works include those by Andy Warhol, Yves Klein and Miró. In 1979 Comte met Karl Lagerfeld who gave him his first commercial assignment for Chloé and later Chanel. He has since collaborated with Vogue Italia, Vanity Fair and Interview, and with brands such as Dolce & Gabbana, Gianfranco Ferré, Calvin Klein, BMW, Ferrari and LVMH, among many others. Comte later traveled to conflict zones to raise funds for humanitarian projects such as "People and Places with No Name." In 2008 he met Ayako Yoshida and has since dedicated more time to art and personal projects; together they produced their first 3D feature film The Girl From Nagasaki in 2013. Comte opened "Neoclassic," his exhibition on the rise and fall of neoclassicism, at the National Gallery of Parma in fall 2016. He has completed four exhibitions from his "Light" series: at Museo Maxxi, Rome; La Triennale, Milan; Galerie Urs Meile, Beijing; and most recently at Dirimart, Istanbul. "Light" is a study of natural landscapes through large-scale sculptures, photography, video installations and projections, exploring the impact of environmental decline on the world's glaciers and glacial landscapes. Comte's books with Steidl include Aiko T (2000), Michael Schumacher: Driving Force (2003), Light (2016) and Aviator (2020).

This book is Michel Comte's love letter to Japan, seen through the prism of his relationship to his wife Ayako Yoshida and the history of her family. Hiro-Hiroshima-is Yoshida's hometown and here Comte begins his journey, not today but precisely on 6 August 1945, the day when an atom bomb desecrated the city, heralding Japan's surrender and the end of World War II. When the bomb was released at 8:15 that morning, Ayako's grandfather Shigetaka was working in the basement of a building not far from the Genbaku Dome, which today remains as part of the peace memorial in Hiroshima. Although just 200 meters from the blast center, he survived against all odds. This sense of the miraculous colors Comte's vision in Hiro, Mon Amour, his visual diary of Japan across space and time. The book combines Comte's recent photos made throughout the country with stills from his and Yoshida's 2013 film The Girl From Nagasaki, their retelling of Madame Butterfly in Nagasaki, the other city to suffer an atomic bomb in August 1945, forever changing Japan's physical and cultural landscape.