Daido Moriyama
Letter to St. Lou
Published by Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 1990
Size: 28.7 x 22.6 cm
146 pages - 127 images
Hardcover
First Edition
Languages: Japanese and English
ISBN 4-309-26130-2
Letter to St. Lou by photographer Daido Moriyama brings together a collection of his work featuring the artist's signature black-and-white photography of landscapes, nature, animals and other more abstract views.
“One summer day, over a period of 8 hours, the dazzling sunlight, which poured down on Saint-Louis, a small town in Normandy, France, was slowly imprinted on the layer of an asphalt plate with a Camera Obscura, a square box that a man had placed there. The blurred vacant scene of “The Backyard with a Small Dovecote,” copied on a plate, became a fossil of light and time, which human beings acquired for the first time and has remained intact until now. This happened because an old ambitious inventor maniac, whose name was Nicéphore Niépce, recorded the view from a window of his room—his long-held sincere dream—and fossilized it under the name of “Héliographie,” that is, a picture drawn by the Sun. It was nothing other than the world’s first “photograph.” Now I sit vacantly at a desk, having nearly finished editing this photographic collection. The scene of that summer day in St. Lou is constantly projected into the corner of my mind and remains visible as I try to write this after…”, Daido Moriyama.