SIGNED BY JAPAN’S FOREMOST CONCEPTUAL PHOTOGRAPHER

MATSUE, Taiji. Taiji Matsue. (Tokyo): Ugeyan, (2003). Oblong quarto, original half black cloth, white aluminum boards, original wrapping and shipping carton. $1450.

Signed limited first edition, number 240 of 900 copies, signed by Matsue, with over 300 full-bleed black-and-white photographic plates, a conceptual landscape of the earth’s surface by the award-winning Japanese photographer, scarce.

"Taiji Matsue photographs landscapes from all over the world, flattening them by adopting a distant view and eliminating the sky… printing them in a high-key tonality… The effect is hypnotic" as Matsue succeeds in taking the genre of the abstract landscape photography "to a conceptual extreme." Assembling photographs from New Zealand to Iceland to Yemen, taken over a decade, Matsue sequences his images, nearly tactile in their silvery textures, with only small captions at the upper left corner, producing the sense of a world remapped "so that landscapes situated continents apart look remarkably similar" (Parr & Badger I:310). Without dust jacket, as issued.

A fine copy. Scarce.