STREET PHOTOGRAPH (SIGNED)

Shimpei Asai
STREET PHOTOGRAPH (SIGNED)

Photographs: Shimpei Asai

Text: Ken Sasugai

Publisher: Shinya sosho sha

108 pages

Pictures: 45

Year: 1970

Comments: Hard cover with illustrated jacket, 20,5 by 22cm. Designed by M. Kataniwa. Dedicated to the famous photographer Yoshihiro Tatsuki.

"Street Photograph," by Shimpei Asai. Signed and inscribed in front by Shimpei Asai to the famous nudes photographer Yoshihiro Tatsuki. Brilliant collection of black and white photos by Japanese photographer Shimpei Asai, set in and around U.S. military bases in Guam - silent and strangely absorbing photos capturing banal moments and quotidian life. A vaguely melancholic, anti-Romantic and yet at the same time familiar and timeless air fills these images - a snapshot aesthetic at work, recalling photography by both Winogrand and Walker Evans, even the austere landscapes of Robert Adams. A thoroughly peculiar photography perfectly balanced between the intimate and the objective, by one of Japan's most criminally overlooked modern photographers. No one in Japan in 1970 was doing photography remotely like this; in fact, the work prefigures American photography of the 70's and early 80's. Fantastic book. A book that belonged in the Martin Parr sanctions of seminal photo books