In the 1990s, a curator asked Daido Moriyama for a self-portrait for an exhibition. Moriyama had nothing suitable on hand, so he turned to lipstick and mascara. The publisher notes that makeup was not among his talents, yet the session yielded a suite of self-portraits it calls humorous, touching, sad, and extremely odd. Nazraeli Press issued the results as One Picture Book #90: Self: hardcover, sixteen pages, twenty duotone plates, and a signed original photograph at the back.

The commission became the method. Asked to supply an image of himself, Moriyama manufactured a face instead of presenting one. The paint is crude, the persona unstable, and the comedy never settles into comfort. Across the plates he is both subject and obstruction, working without a portraitist’s reliable tools and improvising with whatever the dressing table offered. The book’s small scale keeps the experiment close to its origins, and the series structure frames the images as a set of variations rather than a retrospective.

What distinguishes the volume is the meeting of two forms. A modest, tightly bounded book also carries an original signed print, so a published sequence and a unique photographic object share the same covers. The self-portraits resist the flattering conventions of the genre, and their humor holds sentiment at a distance. Seen together, the plates register a photographer testing how far a face can be pushed before it stops reading as his.

For a collector, the interest lies in that conjunction. The book records a specific commission that went sideways, preserves its results in Nazraeli’s One Picture Book series, and includes a signed photograph—a combination that rewards attention to both the printed sequence and the original print. It is a concentrated instance of an artist using the most ordinary materials to unsettle the stability of his own image.