“A KIND OF CHAOTIC EVERYDAY EXISTENCE”: MORIYAMA’S TAKUNO, 2005, SIGNED BY HIM

MORIYAMA, Daido. Takuno. (Tokyo: Sokyu-Sha, 2005). Oblong octavo, original white cloth, original cardboard slipcase. $250.

First edition of Moriyama’s visual documentation of the port of Takuno, one of 1,500 copies, with 22 full-page high-contrast photogravures, signed by Moriyama in Kanji and English.

Moriyama’s pictures are “shot without heed to the accepted protocols— chance condensations of light mix evidence with abstraction. Like the radar sweep, they obliterate as they reveal” (Neville Wakefield). In this work, Moriyama includes previously unpublished photographs taken in the summer of 1987, during a visit to ancestral graves in his parents’ town of Takuno. “A beautifully designed book including such photos as an elementary school in the village, the port, his parents’ home, a brook, and graveyards, where quiet peculiar lyricism becomes lively” (Sokyu-Sha). In Moriyama’s words, “My underlying thought was to show how in the most common and everyday, in the world of the most normal people, in their most normal existence, there is something dramatic… This kind of chaotic everyday existence is what I think Japan is all about.” In the mid 1970s Moriyama developed his ultimate trademark style (for which these images are clear examples) by renting a Tokyo shop and a photocopier, and for 14 days, producing photocopied books of his pictures on demand. See Parr & Badger I, 288; Roth, 218-21.

A fine signed copy.