Record No. 50

Daido Moriyama Record No. 50 — portrait at the centre of the series

Record No. 50 is a distinct entry in Daido Moriyama's long-running Record series. Where most issues follow the open, accumulative logic of street observation, this fiftieth volume concentrates entirely on a single subject: Yaco, a woman Moriyama met at the office of Akio Nagasawa Publishing in late 2021. That narrowing of focus is the defining fact of the book.

The sessions took place across two registers. Moriyama photographed Yaco outdoors in Ginza and Yurakucho, then continued indoors for a smaller number of nude studies. The shift between those two modes — the street-adjacent and the private — gives the book an internal tension that is unusual within the Record sequence. The photographs retain the directness associated with Moriyama's practice, but the tempo is different: more deliberate, more concentrated on the exchange between photographer and subject.

Moriyama came to prominence through his association with Provoke, the short-lived but consequential Japanese photography journal of the late 1960s, and his career has since moved through many formats and subjects. The Record series, running since 1972, has always functioned as his most immediate outlet — closer to a notebook than a retrospective. Record No. 50 sits within that tradition while departing from it: the serial logic remains, but the subject is singular. It is a photobook that works both as an instalment in the series and as an anomaly within Moriyama's broader body of work.

Key features

• Fiftieth issue of Moriyama's Record series, published 2022
• Focused entirely on a single subject, Yaco — an uncommon structure within the series
• Photographs made in Ginza and Yurakucho, with additional indoor nude studies
• Published by Akio Nagasawa Publishing, Tokyo
• Softcover, 280 × 210 mm, 120 pages
• Bilingual texts in English and Japanese