Farewell Photography.

Farewell Photography. Photographs by Daido Moriyama. PowerShovel, Tokyo, 2006. 276 pp., Numerous b&w illustrations throughout, 9x11½".

I think this book is really powerful.

"Inspired by William Klein’s blurred photos of New York street life, Andy Warhol’s silk-screened productions and Jack Kerouac’s free-spirited travel writing, Moriyama developed a new and radical approach to producing images. These broken, rough and blurred black and white photographs paved the way for what would become his future trademark style."

The original book (now very difficult to get hold of) would be my first choice. I think this classic work of Japanese photography is fantastic and would have preferred a straight re-print rather than a "reinterpretation". The decisions behind the "reinterpretation" was explained like this:

"No prints or negatives exist for the material represented in the original Farewell Photography, so this reprint was produced using a copy of the original book as source material.

Larger than the original (and with no text whatsoever), this version emphasizes even more strongly Moriyama's frenetic, dynamic approach to image making.

And the choice to reprint reprinted material (because, after all, the original book was still a reprint of the photographs themselves) raises interesting critical issues.

The aesthetic decisions involved reflect on both photography's development as a medium and the recent interest in the history of photography books - spurred in no small part by the Photobook history by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger."