Tokyoites. Photographs by Yutaka Takanashi. Essay by Roger Pulvers (in English and Japanese) Shoshi Yamada, Japan, 1983. Unpaged. Small quarto. First printing. Stiff wrappers with two thin books bound together, similar to a dos-a-dos binding, with one right facing and one left facing. Original glassine jacket. Unbound 26 pp. booklet containing texts. Housed in two-point, card folio that fits into another, printed slipcase.
A rare publication in an idiosyncratic format by one of the original Provoke members. Highly Recommended!
"Yutaka Takanashi’s work creates a biographical record of Tokyo and its residents. The world within his viewfinder gives the sense of a greater composition that extends beyond the focal center to include details to the extremities of the frame. Although employing a number of different methodologies his lens is consistently focused on the minutiae amongst the mélange. In one work from ‘Tokyoites’ for example, black suits crammed into a train car dominate the image, the small headline on an exposed corner of newspaper giving subtext to mood of the scene: 'Public Opinion on America…'-- excerpt from, Kenneth Masaki Shima, The Changing Faces of Japan, an review of Takanashi's retrospective, held earlier in 2009 at The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo. READ MORE HERE and HERE
Trace of foxing to outer wraps; a bit of tanning to slipcase; possible repair to inner hinge (though very difficult to tell given the highly unusual nature of the binding). |
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