Giappone 1970

Three years before his death, the architect and photographer Carlo Mollino flew to Japan for Expo '70 and returned with a body of images that reads as a final, restless act of curiosity from one of twentieth-century design's most idiosyncratic figures.

On May 21, 1970, at age sixty-five, Mollino boarded an Alitalia DC-8 for Osaka, stopping in Athens, Karachi, and Bangkok along the way. Armed with a Leica and a Polaroid, he spent two weeks photographing a country suspended between ancient ritual and accelerating modernity: temples, gardens, and pagodas alongside the pavilions and crowds of the Expo. Humboldt Books' Time Travel edition also draws on photographs from his other journeys through Asia, with texts by Claudio Giunta, Corrado Levi, and Fulvio Ferrari examining Mollino's relationship to the camera. The volume runs 72 pages, softcover with French flaps and an inserted booklet, bilingual in Italian and English, designed by Teresa Piardi.

Mollino, based in Turin, moved across architecture, furniture and car design, skiing, and aviation with equal intensity, and photography ran through all of it, from his erotic Polaroids to his studies of the Alps. Giappone 1970 catches the polymath late in life, still looking outward.