Nippon gekijo shashincho [Japan, A Photo Theatre].

Tokyo, Muromachi Shobo, 1968. . First edition; oblong 4to (208 x 220 mm, 8¼ x 8¾ in); black-and-white photographs in printed in offset by Fuji Process Corporation, Tokyo, text by Terayama Shuji, nick to a couple of leaves at head, occasional toning caused by different paper stock; tan endpapers with a small bookseller's ticket, green flock wrappers, titles in white on spine and sides, spine sunned with rubbing along edges, very shallow vertical reading crease to upper and diagonal crease to lower side, publisher's printed cardboard sleeve, toned and rubbed with wear to open edges, oxidation to staples, a very good copy in a good slipcase; [210]pp. Japan, A Photo Theatre [or Japanese Theatre] is Moriyama Daido's first book, published after the Photography Critics Association gave him the emerging talent award for a series published in Camera Manichi of Kabuki and other performances. Moriyama was guided by avant-garde poet and dramaturgist Terayama Shuji, who had previously asked Moriyama to provide photographs for his regular column in the magazine Haiku. Terayama also contributes two essays to this book and shares equal billing with Moriyama on the book cover and sleeve. At a time when the country was transitioning towards a more modern and Western culture, interest in traditional Japanese folk arts was considered countercultural. In Japan, A Photo Theatre, Moriyama combines photographs of traditional and other performers with pictures of ordinary people and scenes from everyday life, often emphasising those who seem to have been left behind by the economic boom and its associated social conformism. The final sequence of eight photographs of human embryos in test tubes is unrelated to the series for which the Photography Critics Association Award gave him the award but were the images he chose to exhibit at the ceremony. The Photobook: A History I, p288; 802 photo books from the M+M Auer Collection p483; Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and '70s pp116-22; For a New World to Come: Experiments in Japanese Art and Photography 1968-1979 145; Provoke: Between Protest and Performance, checklist (93); The Japanese Photobook 1912-1990 250 p331-3.