Labyrinth

Contact sheets ordinarily don't leave the confines of a photographer's studio. They are meant for the photographer's eyes alone-a tool to aid in the hunt for a single frame to enlarge and print. The contact sheets reproduced in this volume, however, no longer serve that purpose. Instead, they offer a means of reconsideration, a vehicle for the photographer Daido Moriyama to review the span of his career and to recompose his work.
The pages of this publication reproduce a series of individual contact sheets that Moriyama has created by mixing together negatives from disparate rolls of film. In a single sheet, work from different periods of his fifty-year-long career are juxtaposed by the artist. Work shot in the 1960s, for example, appears alongside images shot recently. While each sheet has a certain theme, taken as a whole, each individual frame is given equal standing regardless of its chronology or provenance; Moriyama makes Iittle or no distinction between each instance of the shutter's release.
Contact-printed negatives of Moriyama's best-known images appear side-by-side with previously unselected and unreleased material, radicaily flattening the traditionai hierarchy of the "masterpiece." Instead, the totality of his work reveals volumes more than singular, isolated images.