Ryoji AkiyamaTsugaru : Ryōji-sensei gyōjōki (Signed and dedicated copy)

Published in 1978 as Akiyama's first collection of photographs, Tsugaru: Ryōji-sensei gyōjōki is an early masterpiece. About seven years after setting up as an independent photographer, Akiyama made up his mind to leave Tokyo for a time and to live somewhere else where he would create new work based on a unique concept. His idea was to dispatch himself to a regional city as the correspondent for a fictional news bureau, thinking that something would emerge out of the photographs of daily life that he dispatched in his reports to the fictional head office. Akiyama moved with his family to Hirosaki in Aomori prefecture, where they stayed from the summer of 1975 to the spring of 1977. Here, Akiyama assumed his fictional role, recording the time he spent in the Tsugaru area and the people he encountered in loving and lighthearted photographs. These photographs capture the culture of a regional city that was thriving in the postwar period of rapid economic growth, but they also reflect the warm gaze of a sympathetic photographer and, if only for a moment, the daily lives and subtleties of life in Tsugaru among people who shared a particular place and time.