Daidō Moriyama

Contact sheets ordinarily don't leave the confines of a photographer's studio. They are meant for the photographer's eyes alone-a tool to aid in the hunt for a single frame to enlarge and print. The contact sheets reproduced in this volume, however, no longer serve that purpose. Instead, they offer a means of reconsideration, a vehicle for the photographer Daido Moriyama to review the span of his career and to recompose his work. The pages of this publication reproduce a series of individual contact sheets that Moriyama has created by mixing together negatives from disparate rolls of film. In a single sheet, work from different periods of his fifty-year-long career are juxtaposed by the artist. Work shot in the 1960s, for example, appears alongside images shot recently. While each sheet has a certain theme, taken as a whole, each individual frame is given equal standing regardless of its chronology or provenance; Moriyama makes Iittle or no distinction between each instance of the shutter's release. Contact-printed negatives of Moriyama's best-known images appear side-by-side with previously unselected and unreleased material, radicaily flattening the traditionai hierarchy of the "masterpiece." Instead, the totality of his work reveals volumes more than singular, isolated images.

Books like Labyrinth

Your next favorite book is out there