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Kanemura, Osamu (Photographer) & Isozaki, Arata (Contributor) : Spider's Strategy: Photographs By Osamu Kanemura

Osiris Publishing Company Limited, Tokyo, Japan, 2001

ISBN 4309904408

First Edition / First Printing. As New in As New Dust Jacket. 102 pages. Collection of architectural, cityscape, and place photographs. One of the most important photography books of our time. The First Hardcover Edition. Precedes and should not be confused with all other subsequent editions. Published in a small and limited first print run as a hardcover original only. The First Edition is now rare. A brilliant production by Osamu Kanemura and Yukimasa Okumura: Oversize-volume format. Glossy silver hard boards with black titles on the cover and spine, as issued. Photographs by Osamu Kanemura. They are all presented "bleed". Text by Arata Isozaki, the great Japanese architect and city planner, appended at the end. Printed in duotone from separations by Hiroshi Aida on glossy stock paper (interleaved with three silver foil-paper overlays) in Tokyo, Japan to the highest standards. In matching pictorial DJ with black titles on the cover and spine, as issued. Presents Osamu Kanemura's "Spider's Strategy". An eye-opening vision of Tokyo pushed to its farthest formal limits. "Graphically dense, darkly printed and devoid (for a non-Japanese speaker) of interpretative signs or text. Shows Tokyo as a city of constant collisions, confusions, and expansion. Ever-present is a tangle of overhead wires, suggesting a spider's web spreading throughout the city" (Publisher's blurb). "Explodes with signage, electrical wires, lights, scaffolding, hanging plastic ornaments, railings, balconies, and construction litter. An out-of-control world held together only by the very edge of the photographic frame" (Artforum). "In these vivid, rich images of Tokyo, Kanemura's exuberant imagery describes a spatial complexity to rival the best Jackson Pollock" (Martin Parr and Gerry Badger). Although they do not acknowledge it, Parr and Badger's (and even the publisher's) comment about Tokyo's bewilderingly abstract character harks back to Roland Barthes' "Empire of Signs" (1982), the best book on Japan by a Western observer, which uncovers the profoundly Japanese aesthetic of a figure like Kanemura as pure sign, as "meaning-less" and "content-less" form and design. Tokyo is an intricate spider's web, which would never ever occur to us, because all we will see (through Western eyes) is urban chaos. As such, it does not matter if a non-Japanese speaker cannot read and understand the signs in Japanese because it does not matter or mean anything to the Japanese speaker either. An absolute "must-have" title for Osamu Kanemura collectors. This copy is very boldly and beautifully signed in both Japanese kanji characters and Roman alphabet ("English") in black pen-marker on the half-title page by Osamu Kanemura. It is signed directly on the page itself, not on a tipped-in page. This title is a great art photography book. This is one of few such double-signed copies of the First Hardcover Edition/First Printing still available online and is in especially fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright, a pristine beauty. Please note: Copies available online have very serious flaws, command as much as $750, or are otherwise priced as though they had collectible value. This is surely an accessible and lovely alternative. A rare signed copy thus. 80 duotone plates. Selected as one of the greatest photography books in "The Photobook". One of the most brilliant photographers of our time. A fine collectible copy. . ISBN 4309904408.

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