Light and Shadow (First edition)

Daido Moriyama
Light and Shadow (First edition)

Photographs: Daido Moriyama

Publisher: Toju-sha

216 pages

Year: 1982

Price: 420 €

Comments: Photo-illustrated wrappers with white and grey lettering on the front cover and spine, 29,5 x 22 cm, b&w photographs. Copy in good condition with several tears (some tapes are visible on the back side) on the dust jacket and a few pages slightly bumped inside (see pictures).

Daidō Moriyama is one of the most important and exciting Japanese photographers of our time, having made prolific, often experimental pictures of modern urban life since the 1960s. This series made in and around Tokyo in the 1980s, when Moriyama focused his mature aesthetic on the city with renewed intensity.

Moriyama approaches the world with an equalising eye, capturing disparate peripheral details that in themselves account for little, but together add up to a powerful diagnosis of modern experience. In 1980s Japan such details encompassed the disorienting and sometimes brutal juxtaposition of traditional culture and modernisation, most visible in the glut of consumer goods and images. But in Moriyama’s photographs these subjects appear alongside the banal elements of any streetscape: a derelict patch of pavement and wall, a car with an aggressive key scratch running its full length, even a single rose blossom.