Record No. 31

Record No. 31 is one issue in Daido Moriyama's ongoing photo-journal series Kiroku (Record), a run of small, self-published volumes he has produced steadily since 2006.

Moriyama began Kiroku in 1972 as a personal counterweight to his commercial magazine work, let it lapse after five issues, and revived it decades later with the publisher Akio Nagasawa. This volume, printed full-bleed in black and white across 160 unpaginated pages, combines snapshots Moriyama made in Paris while there for an exhibition with pictures taken in Tokyo before and after the trip, what he called, in his own note on the book, "a tentative tale of two cities." It marks the point at which the compiled anthology Record (Thames & Hudson, 2017, covering issues 1-30) leaves off and the sequel Record 2, edited by Mark Holborn, picks up.

Moriyama (born 1938, Osaka) has worked in high-contrast, blurred, grainy black-and-white since the 1960s Provoke era, and the Record series functions as an open-ended, book-form extension of that same restless street practice, issue by issue rather than as a single fixed body of work.