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    • 1
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      • Sketch of Paris
      • Stonework and Lime Kilns
      • Earth to Sky: Among Africa's Elephants, a Species in Crisis
      • Emmet Gowin
      • The Enclave
      • Bending the Frame: Photojournalism, Documentary, and the Citizen
      • Mexican Portraits
      • Color Rush
      • Monograph
      • Building
      • Petrochemical America
    • 2
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      • Aperture Magazine Anthology: The Minor White Years, 1952–1976
      • 101 Tragedies of Enrique Metinides / Aperture's House Edition
      • Paul Strand: The Garden at Orgeval
      • The Ballad of Sexual Dependency
      • Immediate Family
      • Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph / Fortieth-anniversary edition
      • Occupied Territory
      • The Dutch Photobook / A Thematic Selection from 1945 Onwards
      • The Latin American Photobook
    • 3
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      • Diane Arbus: A Chronology
      • Is This Place Great or What
      • The New York Times Magazine
      • Untitled: Diane Arbus / Fortieth-anniversary edition
      • Penelope Umbrico: Photographs
      • Photographic Memory / The Album In The Age Of Photography
      • Fieldwork
      • Kodachromes
      • The Pond
      • Destroy This Memory
      • Explosions, Fires, and Public Order
    • 4
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      • ...all the days and nights
      • Photography After Frank
      • Private Views
      • Car Girls
      • Street Art, Street Life - From the 1950s to Now
      • TinyVices / Allan Macintyre: Recent Events
      • TinyVices / Jason Nocito: Loads
      • TinyVices / Jaimie Warren: Don't You Feel Better
      • Nicaragua
      • Travelers
      • RFK
      • Topologies
    • 5
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      • Strangely Familiar - Acrobats, Athletes, and Other Traveling Troupes
      • Paris New York Shanghai
      • Class Pictures
      • Architecture of Authority
      • Czech Eden
      • Early Recordings
      • New York Rises
      • Lola Alvarez Bravo
      • Setting Sun - Writings by Japanese Photographers
      • Ellis Island Portraits 1905-1920
      • Southwest
    • 6
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      • Notes
      • Diane Arbus: Magazine Work
      • Coming of Age
      • The Last Day of Summer
      • The Edge of Vision - The Rise of Abstraction in Photography
      • City Stages

      Edited by Ivan Vartanian,
      Akihiro Hatanaka and Yutaka Kanbayashi

      Setting Sun - Writings by Japanese Photographers

      5 1/2 x 8 1/2 inches | 224 pages, 20 halftone images | Hardcover | 978-1-931788-83-0 | Spring 2006
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Japanese photographers have created a tradition strikingly different from that of their Western counterparts. Their work is based on ideas, rules, and aesthetics that are specific to Japanese culture but often little known in the West. Many photographers throughout the history of the medium in Japan—including master postwar photographers such as Daido Moriyama, Shomei Tomatsu, and Nobuyoshi Araki—have produced substantial bodies of written work that form an essential counterpart to their visual art. Setting Sun is an anthology of key texts written from the 1950s to the present by Moriyama, Tomatsu, and Araki, as well as by other leading Japanese photographers, including Masahisa Fukase, Takashi Homma, Eikoh Hosoe, Takuma Nakahira, and Hiroshi Sugimoto. The only anthology of its kind to appear in English, Setting Sun makes these texts available in translation to Western readers for the first time and provides a crucial context for photographers who have become increasingly well known and admired in the West. Each chapter in the anthology is devoted to a central idea or theme that is particular to Japanese photography, such as watashi shosetsu (or the "I novel"), the bonds between man and woman, the role of nostalgia, and the shadows of a war lost and of a culture jettisoning its past. These writings vary in form from diary entry to scholarly treatise, but all reflect a clear connection between word and image. This connection is so essential that no comprehensive consideration of Japanese photography can be complete without familiarity with these writings.
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