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Daido Moriyama - Set of all 5 books of the 'Woman in the Night' series. Published by Akio Nagasawa Publishing, 2021. All in a limited edition of 350 copies each. All signed by Moriyama. -- Book Size : 12 x 8.5 inches, 210 x 297 mm, Images : 60 - 80 per book (some as foldout) Softcover, Silkscreen cover printed on Canvas. Book titles: Shinobu -- Hiroko -- Naomi -- Yukari -- Momoe Ships from Hawaii with free Priority Mail or UPS upgrade within US. The following was adapted from the website of James Cockroft --- " In late 2020 or early 2021, Akio Nagasawa Gallery announced a new, 4 volume series of silk-screened canvas-bound photobooks from Daido Moriyama. Ends up, there were 5 total and there s a surprise sort of ending. Taken individually, I don t have much to say about any individual volume; collectively, though, I think they may be the best thing Moriyama has released. Each book contains a brief postscript from Moriyama in Japanese and English, all of which follos the same (or a very similar) format: "There was a woman called [Name] in [Location]. She was a person who loved [Thing(s)]. It s already [unit of time] since [I saw her, she disappeared from, etc.]. Even now, I still think of her sometimes. This is a profile of her as she appears in my memory." At first, this may not seem to mean much, but the text is pivotal to the work. Shinobu hung around in Shinjuku s red light quarter and loved flowers. At time of publication, Moriyama hadn t seen her in a decade. The images show mostly (what I guess is) Shinjuku and flowers, with various close-ups of hands and feet, ear, shoulder, etc. of a woman (or women: it s hard to tell), and mid- and full length faceless portraits of the woman in various states of undress. As with all volumes in the series, I didn t get it the first time, or the third, but it grew on me. Hiroko loved ENKA (whatever that is) in Osaka s Minami district. Moriyama hasn t seen her in five years. Flowers, again, but fewer this time; city scenes of mostly what appear to be bars and clubs, and of people on their way to bars and clubs; and more explicit, if still faceless portraits of a woman (or women) backs up this reading. Naomi loved cars. Moriyama often took her out for drives in and around the Nishiki area in Nagoya a few years ago. Now. One might expect images of cars and driving, but one would be wrong. There are, by my count, 5 pictures of cars. Perhaps another five were made from a car. Overall, though, there are many more images of flowers, including a garishly-colored gatefold that makes my stomach churn. There might be more images of advertising than in other volumes, but I didn t count. I expected Yukari to be the last book in the series. After all, original press claimed four volumes, and the text seems to back this up. "The woman who called herself Shinobu in Shinjuku, Hiroko in Minami, and Naomi in Nishiki, went by the name of Yukari in the Nakasu district of Fukuoka." ""Someday, I m gonna live in New York" that s what she always said." So Moriyama missed her for a couple of years, then went into his archive and found a few rolls of half frame shots I m guessing made in the City. Many pages show two sequential-seeming pictures in a nearly 4×3 aspect ratio that looks for all the world like half frame. Two obviously-sequential shots show Moriyama in a hotel room, taking mirror selfies with an unidentifiable (by me) older camera that might be the Olympus Pen W he reportedly used in the early 1970s. Some of the pictures may have been made that long ago, based on the theater marquees in various images; others are far more recent, based on the Victoria s Secret and other signage in Times Square and elsewhere, and I m sure Moriyama and or his editor(s) mixed images from Moriyama s long career for Yukari and other volumes. In fact, I believe a few images appear in multiple volumes. I noticed a couple during the flip-through portions of the unboxing videos, and think I saw more during my multiple trips.
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