Nazraeli Press has published Los Angeles x Shinjuku, a collection that sets two photographers face to face. The book presents a selection of work from Daido Moriyama’s ongoing Shinjuku, Tokyo series alongside Avo Tavitian’s photographs of Los Angeles made over the past three decades. It was published to coincide with an exhibition of the same name.

Moriyama, born in Osaka in 1938, is a pivotal figure in contemporary photography. His black-and-white street work is known for high contrast and grainy textures, and for recording Tokyo’s subcultures, particularly the dense and often gritty ward of Shinjuku. Tavitian was born in Beirut in 1954. After his family moved to the eastern United States in the late 1960s following the 1967 Middle East war, he developed a sense of being an outsider, a sensibility that later shaped his work in Los Angeles, where he settled in the mid-1980s. Both photograph everyday subjects on 35mm film, embracing the medium’s unpredictability.

The hardcover volume runs to 76 pages with 48 duotone plates, and measures 20.32 by 26.67 centimeters. The exhibition it accompanies is curated by Maya Ishiwata and Bjarne Bare and was announced as the inaugural exhibition at the Nazraeli Showroom in Downtown Los Angeles.

For collectors, the volume’s interest lies in the dialogue it stages: two bodies of street photography set side by side and given equal weight. Broad city views sit alongside tightly framed details, while the use of both black and white page backgrounds changes the visual weight of the pictures. The sequence encourages readers to compare distance, scale and atmosphere rather than look only for recognizable landmarks. In this setting, the everyday city becomes a subject that can be approached from more than one position. The association with the first exhibition in Nazraeli’s Los Angeles space gives the book a context that extends beyond its individual images.