Daido Moriyama
Shashin yo Sayonara (Bye Bye Photography), 1972
1760
7 1/4 x 9 in. (18.5 x 23 cm)
Tokyo: Shashin Hyoron-sha.
137 double-page black-and-white photographs printed in rich gravure. Original wrappers, with printed dust jacket. Includes 32 pages of dialogue between photographers Takuma Nakahira and Daido Moriyama.
This is the most emblematic of Provoke photobooks, in which the aesthetic principles of the movement are best expressed. Moriyama pushes the boundaries of the medium: assembling images from a variety of sources, placing them in a discordant anti-sequence, with an array of full-page grainy, blurry, and sometimes indecipherable pictures. The images were further manipulated in the dark room, in a way that results in high contrast prints with a harsh coarse grain. This rough style became somewhat of a trademark and found wide appeal with a new Japanese generation.
Shashin yo Sayonara was produced as a result of a discussion Moriyama had with Takuma Nakahira in the Hilltop (Yamanoue) Hotel in Tokyo in August 1972. The two had been friends since 1964 and both had contributed to Provoke magazine. The argument centered on the function of photography to reflect reality.
“Shashin yo Sayonara (Bye Bye Photography) is the most extreme monument of the Provoke period, indeed it is one of the most extreme photobooks ever published. Daido Moriyama pushes both the form of the photographic sequence and the photograph itself to the limits of legibility, with a brilliant barrage of stream-of-consciousness imagery culled from his own pictures, found photographs—such as shots of car accidents—and images taken from the television set. Any notion of ‘good’ technique is thrown out the window. The pictures exhibit all the qualities of reject negatives discarded in the darkroom then retrieved from the bin. The photographic language is one of blur, motion, scratches, light leaks, dust, graininess and stains ... The pace is frenetic, the image bombardment never lets up, and we reach the book's end in a state either of breathless exhaustion or on an image-fuelled high.†(Parr & Badger)
[Ref. Martin Parr & Gerry Badger, The Photobook: A History, vol.I, pp. 298-299; Andrew Roth, The Book of 101 Books: Seminal Photographic Books of the Twentieth Century, pp. 218-220; Andrew Roth, The Open Book: A History of the Photographic Book from 1878 to the Present, pp. 290-291; M. Auer, 802 photo books from the M. + M. Auer collection, p. 543; Ryuichi Kaneko & Ivan Vartanian - Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and ‘70s, p. 29]
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