1980s Remnants is a 2022 hardcover photobook published by Sokyusha, assembling long-unpublished photographs that Daido Moriyama handed to Michitaka Ota in a box in 1987. The images remained out of circulation for decades before being shaped into this compact, 78-page volume, limited to 300 copies.
About the book
The photographs originate from a body of work set aside rather than abandoned. Some images from that 1987 box surfaced elsewhere over the years, but the larger portion stayed dormant until this publication. That interval is not incidental — it gives the book a quality of deferred arrival, as though the images are returning to view rather than being presented for the first time.
Visually, the work moves through streets, architectural surfaces, and the raw textures of urban space that have long defined Moriyama's practice. What distinguishes this sequence is the presence of plant and floral images — an unexpected element within his better-known image world. The shift is subtle, but it opens the book outward, adding a register that sits in quiet tension with the surrounding urban material.
The book's structure is compact and rhythmic. It does not build toward a retrospective argument or a heavy editorial statement. Instead, it works through accumulation and residue — 71 black-and-white images across 78 pages, with pacing that keeps the photographs close and deliberate. The result is not nostalgic. These images carry the same pressure and visual instability that characterises Moriyama's broader output; the long interval between making and publication has not softened them.
Further titles in the Photobooks catalogue are available at Lokator100.
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. They feel less like an argument than a residue — a stored pressure returning to the surface.
