The Mechanical Retina on My Fingertips

Issei Suda
The Mechanical Retina on My Fingertips

Photographs: Issei Suda

Publisher: Zen Foto Gallery

438 pages

Pictures: 430

Year: 2018

Comments: Softcover, Italian size, 12,8 by 18,3cm. Street photography.

“The Mechanical Retina on My Fingertips” is how Suda named his Minox Camera that held him in thrall from 1991 to 1992. The Minox camera is popularly known as a spy camera - It fits in the pocket with a shutter release as light as the blink of an eye. The resulting images developed from 8x11mm negatives are grainy and have a flat perspective. Suda comments that “no other camera ever accompanied my activities so closely.”

In addition to the Minox works which Suda published in his exhibitions during the 90s - “Trance”, “Keelung”, “Family Diary”, “Naked City”, “1987 Taipei City View” and “Before Night Falls”, this book includes more than 400 works selected from over 600 unpublished images which had long been stored in “A Box of Lingering”, as Suda called it.

“The moment” has finally been released.

― Statement from publisher