This is the 5th vol. from Getsuyosha series of Daido Moriyama’s photobooks. For many years the researchers from all over the world have been longing for the publication of a collection of photos including all the images from Daido Moriyama’s archive filed in the digital database at Shadai Gallery. This collection, which contains the works of Daido Moriyama considered now one of the most prominent japanese photographers, includes photographs from the first decade of his career, allowing us to follow at first hand the trials and tribulations of the artist’s formative years as a photographer. The publication of this photobook will be of great help to the many researchers who are studying Daido Moriyama’s photography as well as the ones who are focusing on the Culture and Representation Studies of Japan in the 1960’s and 1970’s.

“This photograph collection … is a kind of road map of images from all over Japan through a moving car window,” inspired by Keroac’s On the Road. “When I shoot something on a road … I mutate to a hungry hunter. Routes and roads are the hunting field for as a photographer where I hunt images.” Unpaged : all ill. ; 18 cm. [1] p. introduction and colophon in Japanese and English. Colophon title: Karyudo = A Hunter = A hanta. Reprint in new format of work originally published in 1972.

Daido Moriyama, who was born near Osaka in 1938, is one of the most influential representatives of contemporary Japanese photography. His unmistakable style, influenced by the work of Weegee, William Klein and Andy Warhol, has been evolving since the 1970s. His images, often made with a small, hand-held camera, draw viewers in with their diffuse, suggestive layers of gray. Moriyama is aptly characterized as a ìhunter of light,î and his preference for the atmospheric and enigmatic leads to beautiful abstractions of the Japanese urban landscapes. Shinjuku 19XX-20XX features previously unpublished photographs taken in the Tokyo district of Shinjuku, whose labyrinthine streets and dark eddies have always drawn Moriyama in. He says of the district, “Even though it wasn’t a town that I liked because I wanted to like it, or became obsessed with because I wanted to be obsessed with it, the town of Shinjuku has a strange narcotic effect, and there is something about it that traps me and puts me under a spell.”

This volume – investigating the work of a particular photographer, in this case, Daido Moriyama – comprises a 4000-word essay by an expert in the field, 55 photographs presented chronologically, each with a commentary, and a biography of the featured photographer.

Daido Moriyama’s collection of autobiographical essays is so popular in Japan that it was re-issued in a pocket paperback edition. The photographs are well-printed, reproduced full-bleed, one-per-page and represent work spanning his career to-date. The essays were first published in fifteen installments in the Japanese periodical Asahi Camera beginning in 1983. Photographs and text by Daido Moriyama. 290 pages; b&w plates throughout; 4 x 5.75 inches. Text in Japanese.

Looking at a collection of photographs by Daido Moriyama is like hurtling through the city in a cab, spinning your head from side to side, up and down, to take in all the action. And the action doesn’t stop with the click of Moriyama’s shutter. As critic Patrick Remy notes in his introduction, “He endlessly plunges into his contact prints, tirelessly reprints his images, re-centers them, prints them horizontally or vertically to achieve the desired format at the time… enough to make you lose yourself in the maelstrom of his photos (his complete works list 5,758 references).” Close-ups of red, red lips and meticulously manicured hands (except for a bandage on the index finger–what happened?), snowy cityscapes, lonely hotel rooms, storefronts, beautiful women and a pig–no subject escapes him. Like Atget, whom he admires, Moriyama freezes urban evanescence, and like Hosoe, whom he assisted, he uncovers the intimate.

Small format paperback reprint of Daido Moriyama’s first ever book Japan A Photo Theater, originally released in 1968

This gorgeous, text-free, oversized collection of full-bleed color and black-and-white photographs compiles a host of previously unseen color nudes together with the collection that formed Daido Moriyama’s extremely rare fourth solo book, Kagerou, published in 1972. Here, Moriyama captures bondage and nudity with a self-described “samurai tenderness”–a mood, an intimacy and yet also a distance–as if the artist might have snapped the photographs against his will. The stagings are not careful. They are rushed, immediate and mysteriously visceral. Even the knots seem to have been hastily tied. Each of the 60 photographs gathered here suggests that something has happened or something will happen–something furious, resonant or highly anticipated. There are no models smiling, no boasts of romantic conquest, rarely even a face, and certainly no hint of playfulness. Rather, this is a collection of desires, of mothers, sisters and lovers.

This is the extra edition of the custom made book made in the Daido Moriyama printing show at Tate Modern, London on October 14,2012. This extra edition was handmade by Moriyama’s assistants and each copy offers a unique selection of both B/W and Colour photocopied gatefold sheets. The colour images included are mostly from London shot in 2012. Each copy signed by Daido Moriyama. Marked as AP (Artist Proof) not numbered. With a silkscreen printed cover (unique to this edition).

This is the extra edition of the custom made book made in the Daido Moriyama printing show at Tate Modern, London on October 14,2012. This extra edition was handmade by Moriyama’s assistants and each copy offers a unique selection of both B/W and Colour photocopied gatefold sheets. The colour images included are mostly from London shot in 2012. Each copy signed and numbered (of 250) by Daido Moriyama. With a silkscreen printed cover (unique to this edition).

From pictorialism to Provoke: the most extensive history of Japanese photobooks ever published

The Japanese Photobook, 1912–1980 illustrates the development of photography as seen in photo publications in Japan–from the early influence of European and American pictorialism, the German Bauhaus and imperial military propaganda to the complete collapse and destruction of the country in 1945. Then followed a new beginning: with the unique self-determination of a young generation of photographers and visual artists highlighted by the Provoke style–an experimental Japanese photography magazine that had a profound effect on the medium in the 1970s and ‘80s–as well as protest and war documentation of the late 1950s to the early ‘70s, the signature Japanese photobook, as we have come to know it, was born.

Edited by Manfred Heiting, who has also designed and edited extensive surveys of German and Soviet photobooks, the volume is over 500 pages and features such photographers as Yoshio Watanabe, Akira Hoshi, Hayao Yoshikawa, Shinichi Kato, Yasuo Wakuda, Tetsuo Kitahara, Moriyama Daido, Koji Taki, Takuma Nakahira, Yutaka Takanashi, Kimura Ihei, Hamaya, Katura, Kazano, Kikuti, Mituzumi, Watanabe, Yamahata, Sozo Okada and Kazano Karuo, among many others.

With detailed information and illustrations of over 400 photo publications, an essay by Ryuichi Kaneko, the leading historian of Japanese photobooks, and contributions from Duncan Forbes, Matthew S. Witkovsky and others, this is the most extensive English-language survey of Japanese photobooks of this period and a crucial step in making the history of Japanese photography–long neglected by the Western canon–accessible to the English-speaking world.

Originating from the Provoke magazine, this publication sought to continue the critical thoughts and approach to photography first explored through the three issues. Featuring works by Provoke members Yutaka Takanashi, Koji taki, Takuma Nakahira, Takahiko Okada and Daido Moriyama, the publication offers a review of the groups activity, presenting a space for the continued dialogue for critique on the expression and language of photography.

Satoshi Machiguchi, organizer and art designer at Match and Company, has designed many prominent photo books since the 1990s including works by Daido Moriyama. Amongst his work Machiguchi has also designed, edited and published books for Japanese Publisher ‘Bookshop M’ under the photobook labels ‘M’, ‘M/Light’ and ‘MMM’, and has published more than 30 photobooks during his career. His works are annually exhibited as part of Paris Photo and are distributed internationaly. In the first issue of the publication “Satoshi Machiguchi 1000”, we have included reproductions of 38 photobooks focusing on the post war era in this single book of 1024 pages. As you turn the pages while being overwhelmed by the sheer mass of this book, details of several photobooks in their abridged versions appear, including “Snow Country” (Hiroshi Hamaya 1956), “New York” (William Klein 1956), “Someday Somwhere” (Yasuhiro Ishimoto 1958), and “The Americans” (Robert Franks 1958).

“Shomei Tomatsu is the pivotal figure of recent Japanese photography.” –John Szarkowski Casting a cold eye on postwar Japan, the raw, grainy and impressionistic photography of Shomei Tomatsu practically defined Japanese photography in the second half of the 20th century, greatly influencing Daido Moriyama, Nobuyoshi Araki and Takuma Nakihara. His best-known images are his portraits of people and street scenes from the 1950s, when the country struggled to recover from World War II and US military presence was ubiquitous; his photographs of 1960s Japan; and throughout his career, his images of Okinawa, where he died in 2012. Tomatsu’s most famous single photograph is probably Melted Bottle, Nagasaki, 1961, which depicts a beer bottle rendered grotesquely biomorphic by the nuclear blast that devastated Nagasaki on August 9, 1945. The American photographer and writer Leo Rubinfien described Tomatsu’s Nagasaki images as “sad, haggard facts,” noting that “beneath the surface there was a grief so great that any overt expression of sympathy would have been an insult.” This book, which accompanies a major retrospective at MAPFRE in Barcelona, elucidates the rich visual universe of Tomatsu, including his best-known images and previously unpublished work. It is the first comprehensive survey to be published since his death.

Provoke was first published in November 1968 as a dojin-shi, or self-published magazine. It was originally conceived by art critic Koji Taki (1928-2011) and photographer Takuma Nakahira (1938-2015), with poet Takahiko Okada (1939-1997) and photographer Yutaka Takanashi as dojin members. The subtitle for the magazine was “Provocative Materials for Thought”, and each issue was composed of photographs, essays and poems. After releasing the second and third issue with Daido Moriyama as a subsequent member, the group broke up with their last publication First, Abandon the World of Pseudo-Certainty – an overview edition of the three issues. Provoke’s grainy, blurry, and out-of-focus photographs were initially ridiculed as are-bure-boke and stirred a great deal of controversy, yet it had created a strong impact inside and outside of the photography world during that time. However, today, Provoke has become an extremely rare book and very few people have seen the original. Published as part of The Japanese Box: Facsimile Reprint of Six Rare Photographic Publications of the Provoke Era*, Provoke’s facsimile reprint has its photographic images cropped approximately 3 mm from the edges for bookbinding purposes. The reprint also does not include texts by Takahiko Okada due to copyright reasons. Provoke Complete Reprint by NITESHA maintains the original size of the images and includes all original texts, along with the ones by Takahiko Okada. In addition, the volumes will be accompanied by complete English and Chinese translations of the original Japanese texts as a booklet.

The camera’s romance with the car: a photo history

Autophoto explores photography’s longstanding and generative relationship to the automobile. Since its invention, the automobile has reshaped our landscape, extended our geographic horizons and radically altered our conception of space and time, influencing the practice of photographers worldwide.
The book shows how the car provided photographers with new subject matter and a new way of exploring the world. It brings together 500 works made by 100 historical and contemporary artists from around the world, including Robert Adams, Brassaï, Edward Burtynsky, Langdon Clay, John Divola, Robert Doisneau, William Eggleston, Elliott Erwitt, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Anthony Hernandez, Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Joel Meyerowitz, Daido Moriyama, Catherine Opie, Martin Parr, Rosângela Rennó, Ed Ruscha, Hans-Christian Schink, Malick Sidibé, Stephen Shore and Henry Wessel.
Capturing formal qualities such as the geometric design of roadways or reflections in a rear view mirror, these photographers invite us to look at the world of the automobile in a new way. Autophoto also includes other projects, such as a series of car models that cast a fresh eye on the history of automobile design, created specifically for the Fondation Cartier show by French artist Alain Bublex, plus a comparative history of automobile design and photography, essays by scholars and quotes by participating artists.

Carl Johan De Geer, born in 1938, grew up in absurd privilege and abject unhappiness as a member of one of Sweden’s most powerful aristocrat families. His parents showed no discernable interest in him or his siblings, and so he grew up on a grand country estate with his grandparents, went to art school in the late 1950’s, and in an epic choice of rejection lived his life to this day as a perennial Swedish underground artist, working in counterpoint to the privilege of his surname. De Geer, as a masterful Leica M4 snapshot giant à la Van Der Elsken or Daido Moriyama, has the sacred ability to capture the monotone grit of everyday life and demand its reflection. He gives us a glimpse of a Sweden inhabited by people who are the other, whose life experience is impregnated with otherness, providing a visual cue into an unseen world. The visible scratches, fades and imperfections, the wabi-sabi of this collection of vintage prints, is reflected in the images.” Galleri Karlsson 1968 is the softbound catalogue published in conjunction with the Johan Kugelberg curated 2009 Boo-Hooray exhibition of the gritty Vietnam-era social reportage of this unsung Swedish master that parallels the work Ed Van Der Elsken and Anders Peterson.

IMAGE SHOP CAMP, an independent gallery, was opened in 1976, at multi-tenant building located at 2 chome street in Tokyo’s Shinjuku district. 6 graduates of WORK SHOP Daido Moriyama class” includes me were participated. This is where, I showed my photos of Tokyo from January to December 1979, in a radically new way. The series, PHOTO EXPRESS: TOKYO(Shashin Tokkyubin: Tokyo), was accompanied by a monthly, 16-page booklet, with issues numbered 1 to12. The shooting location was the center of 2 chome street in Shinjuku around CAMP. I presented grids of images or enlarged prints, impromptu, immediately after the photo session, almost in real time. Occasionally I transform the gallery into a darkroom, projecting the images directly onto bromide paper attached to the wall, then applying developer and fixer with a sponge. The interval between the various phases of shooting, developing, exhibition, publication, and dis-semination was thus reduced to a minimum. far from wishing to embody an intension that would be prior to the act of taking the photograph, I sought to produce images in a mechanical way, beyond my control: The accidental became a means of experiencing the world.”

The short-lived Japanese magazine Provoke, founded in 1968, is nowadays recognized as a major contribution to postwar photography in Japan, featuring the country’s finest representatives of protest photography, vanguard fine art and critical theory in only three issues overall. The magazine’s goal was to mirror the complexities of Japanese society and its art world of the 1960s, a decade shaped by the country’s first large-scale student protests. The movement yielded a wave of new books featuring innovative graphic design combined with photography: serialized imagery, gripping text-image combinations, dynamic cropping and the use of provocatively “poor” materials. The writings and images by Provoke‘s members-critic Koji Taki, poet Takahiko Okada, photographers Takuma Nakahira, Yakata Takanashi and Daido Moriyama-were suffused with the tactics developed by Japanese protest photographers such as Nobuyoshi Araki, Eikoh Hosoe and Shomei Tomatsu, who pointed at and criticized the mythologies of modern life. Provoke accompanies the first exhibition ever to be held on the magazine and its creators. Illuminating the various uses of photography in Japan at the time, the catalogue focuses on selected projects undertaken between 1960 and 1975 that offer a strongly interpretative account of currents in Japanese art and society at a moment of historical collapse and renewal.

The third issue of the quality quarterly Shashin Eizo / Photo Image, an outstanding avant-garde photography & critic laboratory, featuring impressive series by Kishin SHINOYAMA (LILI, the complete series here, previously unpublished, among which is found ‘the breathtakingly sensual and beastly picture in which a negro boy and a half-caste girl intertwine their bodies’, as MISHIMA Yukio put it when he saw it during the 28 Girls exhibition), Ed VAN DER ELSKEN (striking monochrome portraits, outstanding gravure-printing), Daido MORIYAMA (experimental blurred & grainy urban snapshots; entails some of his now most famous photos), KIMURA Tsunehisa & TANAI Mizuo (vivid monochrome photocollages)

documentation of the Sanrizuka farmers’ opposition and resistance to the government’s plan to build Narita airport. The most powerful example we have seen of an entire subset of little-known Japanese photobooks that deal with this struggle. Although not an official member of Provoke, Kitai was a pioneer in the photographic style championed by the group. His first book, Resistance, published in 1965, was greatly admired by the founders of Provoke, Daido Moriyama and Takuma Nakahira.

Daido Moriyama started the Camp gallery as a way of promoting young Tokyo artists. Kitajima was the first photographer to show his work here, beginning with his Tokyo project, followed by Okinawa. This unique, ephemeral publication dates from 1980, making the opening of the gallery and announcing a series of future projects.

This weighty volume published in January, 2011 brings together Takuma Nakahira’s substantial body of work shot for and published by Japanese photography magazines like Asahi Camera, Design, Photo Art and Nakahira’s own Provoke, from 1964 to 1982. There are 65 photo essays in all, including all major Nakahira series that would end up in his books like For a Language to Come. Like the two books of fellow Provoke-ist Daido Moriyama’s magazine work put out by the same publisher in 2009 (Nippon Gekijou 1965-1970 and Nanika e no tabi, 1971-1974), the series are presented just as they were published in the original magazines, so one can see how the pieces were laid out.

Ken was published by Shaken, the company established by Shomei Tomatsu, who provided the cover photo for the first issue. Like Provoke before it, Ken features much work in the are-bure-boke, or rough, blurred, and out-of-focus, style. Each of the three issues was edited by a different photographer. The first issue contained criticism of the Osaka World Exposition as well as criticism related to photography. Contributions by members of the Provoke crew: Koji Taki, Daido Moriyama, Takuma Nakahira, and Nobuyoshi Araki, among others.

Black Sun is an unprecedented portrait of postwar Japan through the eyes of four of the nation’s most significant photographers. It encompasses and connects ancient Japanese prophecies, the terror of nuclear destruction, and the results of swift and massive westernization. Eikoh Hosoe, Shomei Tomatsu, Masahisa Fukase, and Daido Moriyama are widely acknowledged in Japan as masters of photography. Their work ranges from the metaphoric to the documentary, from the presentation of post-apocalyptic artifacts to portraits of crows and crowded city streets. However varied the approach, this work is unified by a sense of innovation and a persistent search for native roots. Eikoh Hosoe’s representation of the demonic myth Kamaitachi is structured like a dance, enacted among the villagers of the far north country and evoking Hosoe’s childhood memories of the final years of World War II. Shomei Tomatsu’s work ranges from the legacy of Nagasaki to the student riots of the sixties. His photographs combine social documentary with a search for personal identity, a quest which concludes among the remote islanders of Okinawa. Masahisa Fukase’s epic series Crow adopts the universal symbol of the black bird as evil omen. The crow’s somber presence shadows Fukase’s journey to his birthplace on the northern island of Hokkaido, fusing private memories to a darker, national heritage. Daido Moriyama uncovers the malice lurking in the alleys and backstreets of Tokyo. With his confrontational, highly graphic style, Moriyama reveals the overpowering density of life in modern Japan. In the accompanying text, Mark Holborn creates his own picture of Japan’s creative climate, one in which audacious exploration crashes against a legacy of tradition and refinement. He provides previously undocumented links between the photographers and other leading Japanese artists of our time, such as filmmaker Nagisa Oshima, graphic designer Tadanori Yokoo, and dancer Tatsumi Hijikata. Ultimately, the dark lyricism of Black Sun serves as both cultural introduction and global prophecy. The shadow cast by these four photographers stretches beyond the shores of Japan and across the entire length of contemporary experience.

As Japan sped through modernization and technological advancement in the late twentieth century, complex influences shaped its Modern and contemporary art. Chikaku mixes media and generations in exploring that history through themes of time and memory. It includes work from Yayoi Kusama, Daido Moriyama, Yoko Ono, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Miwa Yanagi.

The history of the photographic book goes back well more than a century; the medium of photography and the book format were understood very early on to relate to each other on both technical and aesthetic levels. The examples of truly great combinations of photographic image and text, great design and typography bound together as books are numerous, and make up an impressive artistic, social, and documentary statement of the 20th century. Writer and rare book expert Andrew Roth has selected for this volume a group of 101 of the best photography books ever published: books that bring all of the elements of great bookmaking together to create, ultimately, a thing of beauty, a work of art. Mostly made up of publications in which the photographs were meant to be seen in book form, as opposed to the book being merely a repository of images, this list includes many artists and titles that will be familiar to the collector, but also not a few surprises. Chronologically, the first book is Volume One of Edward Curtis’s seminal 1907 The North American Indian, the last is David LaChapelle’s LaChapelle Land from 1996, and in between are books by Walker Evans and Berenice Abbott, Atget and Brassai, Robert Frank and Garry Winogrand, and many other seminal photographers from all over the world. Each book in the catalogue receives a double page spread including publication information, several image spreads, and a short text about it. The Book of 101 Books, however, is far more than simply an annotated and illustrated catalogue. Six important new essays on a variety of related topics from respected scholars, critics, and artists are included as well: here you will find Richard Benson on the history of printing techniques, Shelley Rice on the societal significance of photography books, May Castleberry on reprints, exhibitions, and keeping books alive for the public; Daido Moriyama on his personal memories of making his classic Bye Bye Photography, Dear, Neville Wakefield on the particular attributes of one of the most recent books in this group: Richard Princeis 1995 Adult Comedy Action Drama, and Jeffrey Fraenkel on the myriad perils of publishing photography books. The catalogue entries themselves are written by the well known critics Vince Aletti and David Levi Strauss. Taken together, the depth and beauty of these essays and images makes The Book of 101 Books both an essential reference and an aesthetically compelling object. In order to insure safe delivery for this item we can only ship Federal Express 3rd Day. An additional charge of $25.00 will be added to your purchase.

Session Press is pleased to announce Taratine, the first US monograph by acclaimed Japanese photographer Daisuke Yokota. Highly regarded for his technical and aesthetic kinships with the avant-garde Mono-ha movement of the ‘60s and with Provoke-era masters such as Daido Moriyama and Takuma Nakahira, Taratine represents a new direction for Yokota, one that centers his work for the first time in another Japanese tradition, that of the confessional photographic I-novel. Comprised of photographs and a moving essay penned by Yokota, Taratine is his most personal work to date. Taratine brings together two bodies of new work—one from a road trip to Tohoku in 2007, and a second taken in Tokyo in 2014. The Tohoku photographs were inspired by Yokota happening upon an ancient ginkgo tree in the Aomori prefecture. Called “Taratine”, this tree has been worshipped by generations of women for its legendary fertility-enhancing properties. Yokota was reminded both of the Tohoku region’s traditional—and lingering—connection to the awe of natural spirits (the influence of Jomon-period animism) and of memories from his own childhood. From this experience came a photographic ode to those traditions and memories, one that also expresses his strong admiration for the important women in his life: his mother, in the case of the Aomori pictures; and his girlfriend, in the Tokyo pictures. By fusing the two together in Taratine, Yokota is charting a new direction for his work. As Marc Feustel observes in the afterword, “Unlike its predecessors, Taratine is driven by a more ambiguous and slippery set of emotions and sensations. A need for maternal love evolves into lust and desire. As much a book about sounds and smells as one of images—Taratine heightens all the senses as it breathes fresh air into a grand Japanese tradition.”

Los Angeles is a city of dualities-sunshine and noir, coastline beaches and urban grit, natural beauty and suburban sprawl, the obvious and the hidden. Both Sides of Sunset: Photographing Los Angeles reveals these dualities and more, in images captured by master photographers such as Bruce Davidson, Lee Friedlander, Daido Moriyama, Julius Shulman and Garry Winogrand, as well as many younger artists, among them Matthew Brandt, Katy Grannan, Alex Israel, Lise Sarfati and Ed Templeton, just to name a few. Taken together, these individual views by more than 130 artists form a collective vision of a place where myth and reality are often indistinguishable. Spinning off the highly acclaimed Looking at Los Angeles (Metropolis Books, 2005), Both Sides of Sunset presents an updated and equally unromantic vision of this beloved and scorned metropolis. In the years since the first book was published, the artistic landscape of Los Angeles has flourished and evolved. The extraordinary Getty Museum project Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945-1980 focused global attention on the city’s artistic heritage, and this interest has only continued to grow. Both Sides of Sunset showcases many of the artists featured in the original book-such as Lewis Baltz, Catherine Opie, Stephen Shore and James Welling-but also incorporates new images that portray a city that is at once unhinged and driven by irrepressible exuberance. Proceeds from the sale of the book will benefit Inner-City Arts-an oasis of learning, achievement and creativity in the heart of Los Angeles’ Skid Row that brings arts education to elementary, middle and high school students.

I happen to have night vision that is much sharper than most people. Even in the deepest darkness, where most people usually strain their eyes to see, I see effortlessly. But there is some darkness that even I cannot manage to see in. And just as others are drawn to the undiscovered universe, I am drawn to the unseen darkness, and move forward towards it. Clipping out the faintest light that crosses my path along the way, I simply let myself be drawn forward, anticipating what lurks in the darkness ahead. (from the postscript) Resolutely, with the distinctive flavor of Japan lingering, the atmosphere of an uncanny darkness seeps into view. The photographer is an individual possessed of a curious constitution and concept, and with the skill and talent to give shape to that expression. As I look upon these photographs, I experience a shiver of fear. ―――― Daido Moriyama(photographer) It appears that another supernova newcomer has arrived. But this time, tinting everything in hues of darkness, rather than emitting the brilliant light of day, As if with a powerful pull into a black hole. Noteworthy also is a unique sense of ornamentation that might be called a contemporary version of the Rinpa school. So young, born in 1992! I feel sure we will be keeping close watch, to see what comes next. ―――― Kotaro Iizawa(photography critic)

Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde explores the extraordinary convergence of artists and other creators in Japan’s capital city during the radically transformative postwar period. Examining works from a range of media–painting, sculpture, photography, drawing, printmaking, video and film, as well as graphic design, architecture, musical composition and dance–this is the first publication in English to focus in depth on the full scope of postwar art in Japan. During this period, Tokyo was a vibrant hub that attracted such critical artistic figures as Taro Okamoto, Hiroshi Nakamura, Ay-O, Yoko Ono, Mieko Shiomi and Tetsumi Kudo; photographers Daido Moriyama, Eikoh Hosoe and Shomei Tomatsu; illustrators and graphic designers Tadanori Yokoo, Kohei Sugiura and Kiyoshi Awazu; and architects Arata Isozaki and Kisho Kurokawa; as well as many important artists’ collectives. Curator Doryun Chong’s essay investigates Tokyo’s sociopolitical context and the massive urban changes that set the stage for the city to emerge as a vital node in the international avant-garde network. Essays by scholars Hayashi Michio and Miryam Sas and curator Mika Yoshitake discuss critical concepts in art and culture at this time, including “graphism,” which manifested itself across various mediums; the development of new sculptural languages; and the “intermedia” tendency that engendered provocative cross-pollination among artistic genres. Masatoshi Nakajima provides an illustrated chronology and Yuri Mitsuda supplies artist biographies. Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant-Garde brings fresh insight to this dynamic metropolis during a time of remarkable artistic burgeoning.

In 1968 the photographer György Lörinczy took advantage of the Hungarian’s government decision to relax its rigorous laws on citizens travelling abroad. The result was his book New York, New York, which projected a rather less jaundiced view of the Big Apple than that of many home-grown photographers. As a foreigner’s vision, and in terms of photographic outlook, Lörinczy’s perspective clearly has affinities with that of William Klein, but his manic exuberance seems to run on pure energy, without the psychological tensions that underpin Klein’s more realistic and informed vision of the city. It seems unlikely that Lörinczy saw the work of any of the Japanese photographers of the day, but his book has a similar ‘anything goes’ feeling, akin to the totally spontaneous style of someone like Daido Moriyama, who coincidentally, was photographing in New York around the same time. Lörinczy’s style is rough, raw and uninhibited, in the best stream-of-consciousness manner. But he has nevertheless thought about New York, New York as a book, not only laying it out in a dynamic cinematic style, but employing such devices as printing one to two pages tracing paper, or utilizing extreme grain, blur and even solarization. The latter, surprisingly, renders his depiction of the city’s energies more rather hallucinatory feeling that Lörinczy seems to have experienced on encountering this most vibrant of cities…This excited, carefree, though not naive view of New York makes a refreshing change from the inbred cynicism of the streetwise native. (Parr & Badger, The Photobook)

apan has been at the forefront of photography throughout the 20th century: photography was both a product of and a driving force in modernisation. This book charts three stages of development in this period of Japanese photography: from post-war documentary bearing witness to the destruction of war; turning inward to personal and subjective interpretations of the rapid changes in Japanese society; to a contemporary movement which consistently pushes the boundaries of the photographic medium. These photographers illustrate the diversity and virtuosity of the unique Japanese visual language. Photographers Nobuyoshi Araki, Hiroshi Hamaya, Naoya Hatakeyama, Eikoh Hosoe, Ryuji Miyamoto, Daido Moriyama, Shigeichi Nagano, Takeyoshi Tanuma, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Shomei Tomatsu, Hiromi Tsuchida and Shoji Ueda.

The recent rise in the West of Japanese photography makes Setting Sun a crucial document. The first anthology of its kind to appear in English, this book collects key texts written from the 1950s to the present by the country’s most celebrated and controversial photographers, and illuminates a set of ideas, rules, and aesthetics that are specific to Japanese culture, but often little known elsewhere. Contributors include Takuma Nakahira and Daido Moriyama, in whose landmark late-60s magazine Provoke a radically new direction in Japanese photography was set; Nobuyoshi Araki, the provocative and prolific chronicler of bound girls (among other subjects); and Eikoh Hosoe, whose collaborations with the Butoh dance master Hijikata and the novelist Mishima made him prominent as an intellectual figure as well as a photographer. In addition, there are selections from modern masters such as Masahisa Fukase, Takashi Homma, Takuma Nakahira, and Hiroshi Sugimoto. Each chapter in the book is devoted to a central theme that is particular to Japanese photography, such as the role of nostalgia in a culture that has often sought to jettison its past amid the shadows of a war lost. The writings vary in form from diary entry to scholarly treatise, but all reflect a clear connection between word and image, one so essential that no comprehensive consideration of Japanese photography can be complete without it. Edited by Ivan Vartanian, Akihiro Hatanaka and Yutaka Kanbayashi.

Japan plays host to the ultimate showdown between Tradition and the forces of the New. Zen and samurai encounter high-tech. Manga takes on the Katsura Imperial Villa. It’s not the New alone that becomes the future, nor simply Tradition that endures; it is the offspring of the two that lasts. Big 26 turns a modern gaze onto Japanese traditions. Art Direction: Markus Kiersztan Design: Garland Lyn, David Lee Contributors: Kyoichi Tsuzuki, Soseki Natsume, Kishin Shinoyama, Luis Sanchis, Kyuyoh Ishikawa, Takashi Homma, Shinro Ohtake, Hiroshi Nakao, Schoerner, Ko Kitamura, Takeshi Shimajiri, Naoko Yamada, Masayuki Yoshinaga, Leonard Koren, Daido Moriyama, Mitsuaki Iwago.

Premier titre publié par The Eyes Publishing, Conversations est un ensemble de vingt quatre entretiens entre Rémi Coignet et les grands acteurs de la photographie contemporaine. Daido Moriyama, Anders Petersen ou Lewis Baltz reviennent sur leur œuvre et dévoilent leurs conceptions du livre de photographie. Au fil des entretiens se dessine une géographie de la photographie contemporaine. Des entretiens avec Morten Andersen, Irène Attinger, Lewis Baltz, Daniel Blaufuks, Broomberg & Chanarin, Elina Brotherus, Raphaël Dallaporta, JH Engström, Bernrd Faucon, Horacio Fernandez, Paul Graham, Guido Guidi, Rob Hornstra, Pieter Hugo, Kummer & Herrman, Syb, Eva Leitolf, Ethan Levitas, Michael Mack, Lesley A. Martin, Daido Moriyama, Mathieu Pernot, Anders Petersen, Joachim Schid, Ivan Vartanian.

Photo Express: Tokyo is a facsimile of the legendary series of twelve booklets published by Keizo Kitajima on the occasion of his exhibition “Photo Express: Tokyo” at CAMP gallery in Tokyo in 1979. The booklets were numbered from one to twelve and one was released each month for a year. Each contained sixteen pages of photographs from Kitajima’s legendary nocturnal wanderings in Tokyo and conveys the spirit of the happenings he organized at the time. Kitajima’s original booklets have now become cult objects, and this new edition is set to become a collector’s item. Keizo Kitajima was born in Nagano, Japan, in 1954, and through working with Daido Moriyama he discovered CAMP gallery in Toyko. Kitajima has exhibited and published extensively throughout his career. In 2001 he created the Photographers’ Gallery in Tokyo as a venue for exhibitions, debates and publishing.