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Nippon gekijo shashincho [Japan, A Photo Theatre]. by Daido MORIYAMA

Creator: Daido MORIYAMA
Offered by: Shapero Gallery

Description
MORIYAMA, Daido.

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Nippon gekijo shashincho [Japan, A Photo Theatre].
Stock Code 111155
Tokyo, Muromachi Shobo, 1968

Current price$1,621.00
Moriyama's first book. Japan, A Photo Theatre [or Japanese Theatre] is Moriyama Daido's first book, published shortly after the Photography Critics Association gave him the emerging talent award for a series published in Camera Manichi of Kabuki and other performances. Moriyama was guided by avant-garde poet and dramaturgist Terayama Shuji, who had previously asked Moriyama to provide photographs for his regular column in the magazine Haiku. Terayama also contributes two essays to this book and shares equal billing with Moriyama on the book cover and sleeve.

At a time when the country was transitioning towards a more modern and Western culture, interest in traditional Japanese folk arts was considered countercultural. In Japan, A Photo Theatre, Moriyama combines these photographs of traditional and other performers with pictures of ordinary people and scenes from everyday life, often emphasising those who seem to have been left behind by the economic boom and its associated social conformism. The sequence of eight photographs of human embryos in test tubes is unrelated to the series for which the Photography Critics Association Award gave him the award but were the images he chose to exhibit at the ceremony.

Moriyama's concerns in this book are the same ones which drove his involvement in Provoke: 'What happens to the thing being photographed when it is put in the context of a photograph? How will it be used? What function does it have on a societal level? Moriyama does not propose to answer those questions; rather, in the act of taking photographs, he continually phrases the open-ended questions. He is not photographing the scene of an enkai, or the scene of a public performance, a parade of musicians, a Shinjuku coffeehouse, an apartment complex, a flower, a person; he is photographing photographs' (Vartanian 118).

First edition; oblong 4to (208 x 220 mm, 8¼ x 8¾ in); black-and-white photographs in offset printed by Fuji Process Corporation, Tokyo, text by Terayama Shuji, nick to a couple of leaves at head, occasional toning caused by different paper stock; green flock paper adhesive-bound wrappers, titles in white on spine and sides, spine sunned with rubbing along edges, very shallow vertical reading crease to front and diagonal crease to rear, tan endpapers with a small bookseller's ticket, publisher's printed cardboard sleeve, toned and rubbed with wear to open edges, oxidation to staples, a very good copy in a good slipcase; [210]pp.

The Photobook: A History, I p288; 802 Books from the Auer Collection p483; Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and '70s pp116-22; Provoke: Between Protest and Performance, checklist (93); The Japanese Photobook 1912-1990 (250) p331-3.

More Information

Documentation:	Documented elsewhere (similar item)
Period:	1950-1979
Condition:	Good.
Styles / Movements:	Modern
Dealer Reference #:	111155
Incollect Reference #:	697210

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