KURATA, Seiji

Japan

£175
Tokyo: Sinchosha Company. 1998.

First edition. 8vo. [658pp] Card covers in white decorated with red circle (i.e. the Japanese flag. Lettered in white (on red) to spine. Illustrated paper wrapper and publisher's band (obi). All in excellent condition with only the very slightest shelfwear. Illustrated throughout with almost no text apart from chapter headings in Japanese and English. Kurata's work is in the tradition of the photo-documentary. He captures, in both colour and black and white, everyday life in Japan from the mainstream to the counter-cultural. As Kurata writes in the introduction (text in English), these photographs were taken between the 1970s and the early 1990s and form "a nearly comprehensive survey of my "street photos" taken within the time and space of Japan". The images are a mixture of previously unpublished material and photographs from earlier collections, in particular the highly regarded Flash Up - Street Photo Random Tokyo. This important collection demonstrates Parr and Badger's observation that Kurata "has an unerring instinct for pictures that suggest stories".

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