Mantis is not a survey of Daido Moriyama’s career but a single roll of film examined decades after it was exposed. The twenty-one frames reproduced here all come from one contact sheet bearing a 1987 imprint, printed full bleed as duotone enlargements across forty-eight pages. What the book records is not a subject so much as the act of photographing: Moriyama worked one motif until satisfied, moved on, and repeated the process a third time, leaving the volume to fall into three chapters he did not plan.
The sequence opens with a close-up of a praying mantis resting on the hand of Masahisa Fukase, Moriyama’s friend and contemporary. After several frames Moriyama breaks off, and the roll continues in a studio apartment elsewhere. There a female subject gradually takes on mantis-like postures, then gives way to a final group of portraits whose timelessness is betrayed only by what precedes them. The reflexivity is the point: a photographer known for sprawling, geographically restless bodies of work here allows one contact sheet, revisited years later, to become the book’s true subject.
Nazraeli Press issued Mantis as a slipcased hardcover of forty-eight pages in its NZ Library series, the photographs accompanied by no mediating text beyond the sequence itself. The full-bleed enlargement of small negatives turns film grain, shadow and the accidents of a working photographer’s attention into the book’s texture. Design and editing are inseparable from the meaning here; the ordering is not documentary but cumulative, and it rewards reading the volume as a sequence rather than a portfolio of single images.
Collectors who follow Moriyama or the photobook as a form have reason to look closely. The project’s unusually narrow premise, one roll, one year, one chain of attention, distinguishes it from the overview volumes that dominate his bibliography, and its place in a coordinated library of artist’s books situates it within a specific publishing program of the 2010s. It is a concentrated demonstration of how sequencing and reproduction can make the making of a photograph the subject of a book.
