In 2015, following a museum opening of his work in Houston, Daido Moriyama stopped in Los Angeles and spent two days photographing the westside. He worked in Santa Monica, Venice, and the Marina, in alleyways and private homes. Nazraeli Press presents the resulting pictures as two companion volumes in its One Picture Book Two series: Daido “Uno” in black and white and Daido “Dos” in color. This book is the color counterpart, a hardcover of sixteen pages. The publisher describes the visit as a stop made along the way rather than a commissioned survey, and the two volumes together show the same brief encounter rendered in two different photographic registers.
Moriyama was born in Osaka in 1938. The publisher calls him arguably the most influential photographer of his generation, notes that his work is widely exhibited and held in major museum collections, and describes his images as depicting the contrast between traditional values and modern society in postwar Japan. The publisher also characterizes his ambition as a desire to use photography in “the fossilization of light.” Color is not the register with which his name is most often associated, and that makes this small volume a pointed counterpart to its black-and-white sibling: one episode, photographed over two days, split across two books rather than resolved into a single sequence.
The book belongs to a series built around the single image rather than the accumulation of a monograph. At roughly six by eight and a half inches and sixteen pages, it is an intimate object with its own reading pace. The One Picture Book Two format asks the viewer to hold a small group of pictures in the hand, and the pairing of Uno and Dos makes the relation between the two volumes part of the project rather than an afterthought.
Each copy of Daido “Dos” includes a 5 x 7 inch original print signed by the artist. That inclusion, together with the black-and-white and color pairing, defines the book’s appeal for a collector: not scale or spectacle, but a specific two-day episode in a long career, issued in two registers, with a signed print inside.
