1980s Remnants is a 2022 hardcover photobook published by Sokyusha, drawn from a box of long-unpublished 1980s photographs that Daido Moriyama handed to Michitaka Ota in 1987. Some images from that box appeared elsewhere in the years that followed, but the larger portion remained set aside until this publication gave them form.
About the book
The photographs originate from a body of work held back rather than discarded. That interval between making and publication gives the book a quality of deferred arrival — the images read less as a fresh argument than as a residue returning to the surface. Visually, the sequence moves through streets, architectural surfaces, and the raw textures of urban space long associated with Moriyama's practice. What distinguishes this volume is the presence of plant and floral photographs within that otherwise familiar urban register — a quiet, unexpected counterpoint rather than a departure.
The book's structure is compact and rhythmic, working through accumulation rather than a retrospective statement. Across 78 pages and 71 black-and-white images, the pacing keeps the photographs close and deliberate. The long gap between exposure and publication has not softened them; the same pressure and visual instability that mark Moriyama's wider output remain intact here.
About Daido Moriyama
Daido Moriyama was born in Osaka in 1938 and moved to Tokyo in 1961, entering the orbit of the VIVO group before working as an assistant to Eikoh Hosoe. He began his freelance career in 1964. His practice — rooted in black-and-white street photography, urban fragmentation, and the visual instability of modern Japanese life — has remained one of the most sustained and recognisable bodies of work in postwar photography.
1980s Remnants shows a quieter but still unmistakable aspect of that vision. The images remain rough, restless, and materially alert, yet the long interval between their making and publication gives them a slightly different temperature.
Further titles from Sokyusha and the wider Photobooks catalogue are available at Lokator100.
