Tokyo: A City Heading for Death by Nobuyoshi Araki

‘His experience, his memories, his feelings - they stick to Tokyo like honey and their movements are synchronised with the metamorphosis of Tokyo itself’

These photographs were taken in 1989, following the death of Araki’s father and mother, and in the last year of his wife’s life. Her death coincides with the publication of this book.

‘To Winter contains the view of the end of a certain form of city, the termination of an age, the extinguishment of a certain physical feeling.’

‘This death, therefore, is no ordinary death but a death of which life forms a part. It is not death against life, but death as a basis of life, death which envelopes life. Life and death race on, back to back. Life and death are like mirrors set against each other, from which reality emerges.

‘We are usually unaware of this structure of life and death, but we can see it clearly in ‘To Winter’. The photograph, after all, may be a device meant to give us a glimpse of just such a structure.

‘Vladimir Nabokov once wrote that our life was nothing more than a ray of light darting between two infinite stretches of darkness. The photograph, then, is a window looking out to the infinite darkness which is always there on either side of our life. Death is a vast expanse of darkness which, as the foundation of life, flits in and out of our life.’

Rare first edition of the book in very good condition. Paperback with dust jacket and obi band. 112 pages of black and white photographs and an accompanying text (excerpted above) by Toshiharu Ito. 1990.