“I WANTED TO GO TO THE END OF PHOTOGRAPHY”: MORIYAMA’S ‘71-NY, WITH 210 RICH PHOTOGRAVURES, SIGNED BY HIM

MORIYAMA, Daido. ‘71-NY. (New York): PPP Editions, 2002. Thick octavo, original blue and white stiff paper wrappers, original die-cut plain black dust jacket, original corrugated cardboard slipcase. $750.

First trade edition of images taken during Moriyama’s first trip to New York in 1971, with 210 photogravures and 14 pages of contact sheets, signed “Daido” on the title page.

In a 2001 interview, Moriyama confessed that, while he had developed a sight unseen love-affair with New York, on his first trip there, he “spent very little time outside— I stayed predominantly in my hotel room watching TV.” “New York 1971 is a city of shadows. Shot without heed to the accepted protocols, these chance condensations of light mix evidence with abstraction. Like the radar sweep, they obliterate as they reveal” (Neville Wakefield). Here are blurred storefronts shot from a moving taxi, two propped-up feet and a TV screen, misty park statues, grainy billboards and movie marquees. In an extreme act of disassociation and disorientation, more like “a mad dash of impulses and ideas,” Moriyama’s images of New York are “scattered to the four winds… but the eye (and the eye is part of the mind) recollects the shards” (Roth). Three years afterwards, Moriyama resurrected his New York pictures and published them in a novel way: he rented a Tokyo shop and a xerox machine, and for 14 days produced photocopied books of his images on demand. “The xerox methodology inevitably pushed Moriyama’s imagery to the limits of coherence, as was the intention” (Parr & Badger). It can be asked of each of Moriyama’s works, “Is there to be found anywhere else in the history of photographic bookmaking such a raw cry as this?” (Roth). This is the first formal publication of those raw images of New York. Text in English and Japanese. Parr & Badger, 301. Open Book, 396. See Roth, 218-21.

Fine condition, signed.