In 2015, after a museum opening of his work in Houston, Daido Moriyama stopped in Los Angeles to photograph the westside. Over two days he worked in Santa Monica, Venice and the Marina, in alleyways and private homes. The visit produced two Nazraeli Press books in the One Picture Book Two series: Daido “Uno”, black and white, and Daido “Dos”, in color. Both are compact hardcovers, and this volume presents sixteen duotone plates across sixteen pages. Moriyama, born in Osaka in 1938, has spoken of photography as a way of fossilizing light, and has long photographed the friction between traditional values and modern society in postwar Japan. Here that practice meets a city that is not his own.
The small scale matters. A book of sixteen plates cannot account for a city, and it does not try. It records a short stay, and its brevity forces attention onto sequence, adjacency and the pace of looking. The black-and-white register is not incidental either: paired with the color “Dos”, it makes this volume one half of a deliberate division of the same visit. The choice of monochrome for these Los Angeles pictures places them within the printing and tonal habits that run through Moriyama’s work, while the subject remains unfamiliar ground.
Moriyama is among the most widely exhibited photographers of his generation, and his work is held in many museum collections. Readers who know the Japanese cities central to his reputation will find the interest here in watching his method applied to Los Angeles: not a commissioned portrait of the city but a visitor’s encounter, with the grain and contrast familiar from his other books turned on unfamiliar streets and interiors. The two-day span keeps the project tight, and the book does not claim more than that.
Collectors of the series will recognize this as its thirty-eighth title and as the black-and-white partner to “Dos”. The pairing gives the volume a specific place: two publications from one visit, divided between monochrome and color, each incomplete without the other. The hardcover format, the modest plate count and the series context make this a book about constraint and adjacency as much as about the photographs themselves.
