Witness No. 2.

Witness No. 2. Photographs by Daido Moriyama. Joy of Giving Something, New York, 2007. 96 pp., 58 duotone illustrations, 9½x12".

I wrote about Witness No.1 back in February and I feel equally excited about Witness No. 2 being out now!

I really do love this idea of a series of small, limited edition books created, edited and determined by an individual artist.

For this second edition Daido Moriyama "presents work in which – although not immediately apparent – reality collides with imagination." He takes us to Shanghai - a place of his childhood imagination, but which he'd only first visited in recent years. The resulting photographs of Shanghai found in this book is the Shanghai Daido Moriyama found on seeing it with his own eyes exploring its' streets.

He's also commissioned work by two other Japanese artists - Emi Anrakuji and Ken Kitano. "Emi Anrakuji’s jigsaw puzzle-like portraits of herself – naked, clothed or partially dressed – blur the boundaries between documentary and staged photography. Ken Kitano has photographed numerous people of the same age or having the same occupation, and has then exposed dozens of the negatives, one at a time, onto a single sheet of paper."

For more about this book go here to Nazraeli Press.