Farewell Photography ─ Daido Moriyama

A landmark photobook pushing Daido Moriyama’s radical image-making to its furthest extreme.

Farewell Photography is a photobook by Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama. Having joined Provoke from its second issue, Moriyama had already begun to develop an even more radical approach to are, bure, boke, but with this book, published in 1972, that tendency reached its most uncompromising form. Fragmentary images — including blank exposures made while advancing the film, fallen negatives, and reproductions of posters and television screens — surge through the pages with overwhelming intensity. The result is an extraordinary work that seems to give photographic form to a world in which everything has already been reduced to images. At the end of the book is an important conversation between Moriyama and his friend and rival, Takuma Nakahira.

As Moriyama later recalled: “We used film in those days, so you would first take a blank shot. The image would suddenly appear, and that is also a photograph. I also picked up things that Nakahira had thrown away in the darkroom. I gathered all those things and made this. For better or worse, it was excessive. There was almost no reaction at the time. It was like, what is this? Some people said it was just design, others that it was photographic suicide. Only Araki (Nobuyoshi) said he was jealous.”

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Title: Farewell Photography
Artist: Daido Moriyama
Publisher: Shashin-Hyōron-Sha, 1972
Format: Softcover with dust-jacket, perfect binding
Size: 230 × 185 × 21 mm
Pages: 308
Language: Japanese
Edition: First edition

Condition: Very good