Signed, Koichi Miyazaki - Scissorings - 1968

Scissorings

Signed, Koichi Miyazaki
Sisousha/1968/japanese/213*213*10

“Scissorings” is a collection of works by Koichi Miyazaki, one of Japan’s leading photographers. Beginning in the 1960s, he worked as a designer in the advertising department at Takashimaya. He later moved to Mos Advertising, founded by Hiroshi Sano—who had been his supervisor at Takashimaya and would go on to write the texts for many of Miyazaki’s photo books—where he worked alongside his close collaborators Koichi Inakoshi and Shinpei Asai (The trio also held a joint photography exhibition in the 1970s). True to his reputation as a “photographer who doesn’t take photographs,” he published “photography books” in the 1960s featuring motifs drawn from newspaper and magazine clippings, as well as television footage; this volume is his first such book. Considered a pioneer of “found photography,” he isolated the “backgrounds” of newspaper and magazine illustrations—which were used for specific “meanings” such as “capturing reality,” “documenting,” or “providing captions”—and revealed a “new world” by viewing the images flatly. Published in the same year as *Provoke*, with which it forms a stylistic pair, this collection stands out among the “contemporary photography” works of the early 1970s for its exceptional individuality and creativity. A little-known masterpiece. Text by Shinichi Kusamori. Limited to 500 copies.