ISHIGURO, Kenji. ... His Work Volume 1 / Hiroshima Now. Tokyo: Shinya Sosho-sha, 1970.



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'OUR REMEMBRANCE OF OBJECTS WHOSE SHADOWS ARE THE SHADOW OF THE BOMB'



ISHIGURO, Kenji.
Kenji Ishiguro His Work Volume 1 / Hiroshima Now.
Tokyo: Shinya Sosho-sha, 1970.

Oblong 8vo (224 × 248 mm), pp.[128]. 92 black-and-white photographs, texts in Japanes and English by Tadanori Yokoo and Hideo Nakai; spotting to top edge. Off-white endpapers. White cloth-covered boards, spine lettered in blue; slightly cocked, lightly marked, soiling to top edge. Photo-illustrated dust-jacket; very lightly marked, faint toning to spine. Very good in a near-fine dust-jacket.

First edition. In Hiroshima Now, Ishiguro presents a view of contemporary everyday life in Hiroshima where a certain amount of normality has returned, although there is a pervading sense of menace in many of the quiet pictures. Several show people looking upwards towards the sky or nervously around their surroundings. These photographs were made between 1965-66, twenty years after the atomic bombs were dropped. They are uncaptioned with the exception of four small images which are reproduced on the dust-jacket flaps, these are accompanied by short texts that relate to the bombing and its aftermath.

In his afterword Tadanori Yokoo writes: ‘… it seems to me that his Hiroshima does not simply relate to us a story of atomized Hiroshima but some sense of terror far apart from Hiroshima itself. Mr. Ishiguro did not just take pictures of Hiroshima as it was razed by an atomic bomb but described for us a more primitive type of fear we have in our innermost heart… His Hiroshima tells me that all pictures must begin with Hiroshima and end with it… Hiroshima Nowreveals our remembrance of objects whose shadows are the shadow of the bomb. This remembrance is the eternal scar upon our Japanese mind.’

There were plans for Hiroshima Now to be the first of three volumes, however, only Volume 1 was ever published. Scarce.

Kaneko, R. and Vartanian, I., Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and ‘70s pp.150-5.

 

5 copies located in OCLC: National Diet Library, Tokyo; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Princeton; University of Pennsylvania, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

 

 

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