“A CHILLING PROPHECY”

MATSUE, Taiji. Hysteric. (Tokyo: Hysteric Glamour, 2001). Large square quarto, original photographic paper-covered boards. $1500.

Signed limited first edition, number 403 of 500 copies, boldly signed by Taiji Matsue, with 88 black-and-white photogravure plates.

Confronting the challenge of "the abstract photographic landscape… Taiji Matsue takes the genre to a conceptual extreme, doing for the landscape what Ken Ohara did for the human face." If photography can be seen as fundamentally "a mechanism that reduces the world to a uniform flat surface," Matsue's photographs of landscapes around the world, taken throughout the 1990s, produce a geography similarly flattened and "devoid of much of its individuality… The effect is hypnotic, the tenor of Hysteric both beguiling and distinctly uneasy… What begins as an exercise in formal Conceptualism seems to end as a chilling prophecy of an amortized, depopulated world" (Parr & Badger I:310). Essay in Japanese and English by critic Aki Kusumoto. Without dust jacket, as issued.

A fine copy.