TWICE SIGNED BY MASAO MOCHIZUKI

MOCHIZUKI, Masao. Television 1975-1976. (Tokyo: SNAP-Sha, 2001). Large square quarto, original black cloth, original slipcase. $1200.

Signed limited first edition of Mochizuki’s fascinating photobook, twice signed by him, in silver ink on the page opposite the title page, and in black ink, in kanji, on the colophon page, an impressive over-size quarto featuring with 82 photogravure plates, in original slipcase.

In 1975, in a dark bedroom in his Tokyo home, Masao Mochizuki set a twin-lens reflex camera in front of his television and "began to shoot a series of strange pictures… trying to encapsulate the life force of television on film… At intervals of tenths of a second to several minutes… Mochizuki captured live images—or afterimages—that flowed in rapid succession out of the television" (Eikoh Ikui). Featuring 82 photogravure plates selected from 7000 exposures taken over a two-year period, Mochizuki's Television displays coverage of the fall of Saigon, the docking of Soviet and American spaceships, the death of Mao Tse-tung, a broadcast of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai and other sequentially arranged images. With essay by historian Eikoh Ikui in Japanese and English. Text in Japanese and English. Limited to 1800 copies; as issued without dust jacket.

A fine signed copy.