Daido Moriyama made these photographs over a period of years, returning to a single motif: kuchibiru, lips. The sitters are not of one kind. Some are anonymous women whose likenesses already circulate on posters; others are friends and acquaintances. A face reproduced on a wall and a face encountered in daily life arrive in the same frame of attention, and the book holds them side by side without ranking one above the other. That mixture, rather than any single image, gives the sequence its shape.

The format is small and deliberate: a hardcover volume in the One Picture Book series from Nazraeli Press, with ten duotone plates and one original print. Ten plates is a narrow allowance, and the book makes repetition do the work of sequence. Lips recur across strangers and intimates; they are cropped, paired, and printed at high contrast, until the fragment reads less as anatomy than as a sign the camera keeps meeting. Moriyama’s method here is serial and unsentimental, attuned to whatever the street and the printed image offer.

The subject is narrow but not incidental. Lips belong to the face’s most expressive region, yet in many of these pictures they have already passed through another surface, reproduced on paper and separated from speech or gesture. The book is as much about how images circulate as about a part of the body, and about a camera that treats a poster and a friend with equal appetite.

For a collector, the interest lies in the meeting of motif and scale. In a short sequence, ten plates and an original print, the recurrence of lips gives the book a coherence rare at this length, and it shows Moriyama’s working habits concentrated into a small, deliberate object.