Whenever I'm teaching a course that has to do with contemporary Japanese photography
or with the development of photo books, one of the titles that I very often show to the
students is Daito Moriyama's classic 1972 publication by Photography.
It's a book that often I use in teaching as a kind of very extreme example of what it's
possible to do with the photo book form.
In a certain way, I guess you could describe by-by photography as the Finnegan's wake
of photo books.
For most people who turn through its pages for the first time, it seems completely opaque
and unfathomable and disorganized and just a complete puzzle.
Right now, for example, I'm teaching a class at Barnard College in New York and I've just
given my students the assignment of going through by-by photography from cover to cover thanks
to a set of JPEGs of the book that I shot at the Metropolitan Museum's library.
And I've asked those students just to describe as precisely as they can what are the contents
of the book and what is the experience of the imagery as you turn the pages from cover
to cover.
I find it's a great assignment to give to students because it really makes them pay
attention to what is on the pages and to the sequence of those pages as well.
In talking to Moriyama, what you discover very quickly is that the sequence of the pages
in by-by photography is relatively arbitrary.
He tells the story that he made the selection of the photographs and gave them in a stack
to the publisher and said, find a graphic designer and you can lay out the book in any
order that you want.
I'm sure that he went back through the dummy of the book carefully before it was published
but in the end he makes the point that the sequence of the images doesn't reflect his
personal taste or his personal wishes or vision in any way.
He says or implies that he was very happy to collaborate with chance to accept whatever
sequence of images someone else came up with based on, again, his selection of photographs.
For me, it's a way of working that really ties in very directly to the process art of
the 1960s and 1970s and it also ties into the long 20th century tradition of artists
wanting to collaborate with chance and to allow chance and sometimes random elements into
their artworks.
That's what I think makes it such a classic of 20th century visual art and it also makes
it a publication that resists easy access and easy interpretation.
I think for those reasons, bye-bye photography will have a long, long life as a kind of object
of critical fascination.
It's also a book that has appeared in a couple different editions that Moriyama has been
involved in.
I guess about seven years ago there was an edition published by Power Shovel, if I'm
not mistaken.
It's much larger in size.
It's on glossy paper rather than the matte surface paper of the original edition.
It gives you a completely different experience as you turn through those pages, which makes
you think back to that first edition and really appreciate in a new way the very unique qualities
of that original edition.
Now there's a third edition, a very small pocket-sized edition that is on the market,
which is again a very, very different visual interpretation.
It looks almost as if it's printed on newsprint.
Almost all the detail has dropped out of the images.
It's almost entirely a kind of black and gray and white sequence of images that you see
rushing past you as you turn the pages.
The three very different interpretations from a kind of original score, the prints that
Moriyama made.
