Nazraeli Press has built its One Picture Book Two series around a deceptively simple proposition: invite a photographer to shape a small, concentrated sequence. For the tenth entry, the invitation went to Daido Moriyama. The subject is motorcycles, a motif he has followed through the streets of Tokyo for decades, and the book gathers eleven images he selected from that long engagement, printed full-bleed in double black ink across sixteen pages. The scale is intentionally reduced; the attention is not.
That pairing of a narrow subject with an extended, almost habitual practice places Daido Moto within Moriyama’s larger inquiry into postwar Japanese urban life, where the traditional and the modern press against each other. A motorcycle parked on a street is not merely a machine. In his handling, it carries the gloss, weight, and transience of the city, and the full-bleed duotone printing lets those blacks and metallic surfaces register with unusual force. Eleven pictures is a small count, but it is enough for recurrence and variation to become legible, and the photographer’s own selection gives the sequence the character of an edited statement rather than an anthology.
Moriyama, born in Osaka in 1938, has been one of the most widely exhibited photographers of his generation, and his work has appeared in dozens of books. Nazraeli’s series is itself an argument about how photography circulates: a compact hardcover as a deliberate form, not a survey or a retrospective. Readers who know Moriyama’s larger books will find here a compressed instance of his visual thinking; readers approaching him for the first time get a self-contained episode with a specific subject and a clear authorial hand.
Each copy is limited to 500 numbered copies and includes an original signed 5 x 7 inch print, making the book at once a reading object and a small photographic work. Collectors drawn to Moriyama’s street photography, to Nazraeli’s bookmaking, or to the One Picture Book Two sequence as a coherent publishing project will recognize why this title holds a particular place within it.
