Daido Moriyama: Mirage

Mirage collects color photographs Daido Moriyama shot in the 1970s and left unpublished for four decades, presenting the film's chemical decay as inseparable from the images themselves.

The pictures, drawn from commissioned work including images made for the Japanese edition of Playboy alongside more personal frames of the city at night, survive only as slides that have mildewed and discolored in storage. Editor Hisako Motoo describes the effect as looking at the scenes "through a blur of frosted glass," the warm, bruised color shifts standing in for the passage of time itself. Rather than restore the images, the book, the fourth in an annual series produced by Moriyama with art director Satoshi Machiguchi and Motoo under the MMM imprint, prints them as found: a slipcased hardcover with a tipped-in cover photograph, each copy signed by Moriyama on the title page and numbered against the slipcase, in an edition of 1,000.

The book extends Moriyama's decades-long interest in the photograph as a degraded, grainy, blurred trace of experience rather than a clean record of it, a sensibility he has pursued since the 1970s across Tokyo street photography, self-published zines and major museum surveys alike.