Taxi Dirty Book
Yoshinori Mizutani's first book pairs two bodies of pictures made in Tokyo: taxi drivers photographed frontally from the back seat, and books and magazines, some of them pornographic, abandoned on the street.
The two series sit against each other without text or captions, proposing distinct ways of experiencing the city and, by extension, distinct ways of looking: one an enclosed, face-to-face encounter with a stranger doing his job, the other a glance down at discarded printed matter that once circulated its own images of looking and desire. Published by the Geneva imprint Boabooks in November 2014 as a 48-page softcover with 33 color illustrations, the book carries no text, letting the two series' juxtaposition make its own argument about the layered, sometimes furtive ways a city gets seen.
Mizutani (b. 1987, Fukui) studied at the Tokyo College of Photography after a degree in economics, and the same year Taxi Dirty Book appeared he was named to the LensCulture Emerging Talents Top 50, selected for Foam Talent Amsterdam, and included in the Kiyosato Museum of Photographic Arts' Young Portfolio. His subsequent books, including Tokyo Parrots, Colors, and Hanon, continued to find unnoticed intersections between Tokyo's built and animal life; the library holds several of these later titles alongside this early, image-only debut.
