shashasha

A rare time capsule from the 1980s

The story of Daido Moriyama’s photobook “1980s Remnants” begins in 1987, when Moriyama handed Michitaka Ota (of photobook publisher Sokyusha) a box filled with one thousand of his photographs. Some photos from the box were published in “A Journey to Nakaji” later that year and, more than ten years later, in the 1999 photobook “Dreams of Water.” Moriyama insisted that Ota keep the box of photographs, and so they stayed in a corner of Ota’s apartment. A recent conversation brought the box back to mind, and finally, writes Ota, “I was pleased to find that I now can give them some shape.”

Even though the more than 30 years that have passed between the creation of these photographs and their eventual publication becomes part of their charm and magic, these 1980s Moriyama snapshots – of streets and textures and the beauty of urban chaos and, somewhat atypically, plants and floral wildlife – remain fascinating in their own right.