Blue Period / Last Summer
2017
$96.00
Blue Period / Last Summer by Nobuyoshi Araki. First impression of this Dashwood slipcased edition from 2017 in new condition. No markings. This is a brand new book. Please see pictures. PayPal accepted, any questions please get in touch.
Artist Statement about Blue Period / Last Summer
—The two (blue period/last summer) works look very different. They do! I’d say Last Summer is the future; it has a certain sense of resignation about it. Blue Period is the past, because it’s about how memory inhabits us. But we don’t yet have a memory of the future. You had better get both of them [laughter]. That’s right! Seriously. They are awesome. They knock me out. The red you see in Last Summer is red of blood. And the blood must be shed. Blue just won’t cut it. It would just seem off. I’d say [Last Summer] surpasses Mizoguchi’s Ugetsu Monogatari. —It reminds me of the faded tones of old movies on VHS. True. When we watch those movies, we watch them with the already lost tones. The original is forever gone. The same can be said of ancient temples like Horyu-ji. Restoration kind of kills its beauty, as I’m convinced old shrines and temples were designed with the weathering away of colors over time in mind. It makes them more interesting. Blue Period, too, goes all the way back to the beginning. In a way, my path as a photographer was laid out for me thanks to everything that happened before that. You know, when we look at Atget’s photobooks, what we are looking at are the faded tones of countless reproductions. We can’t see as Atget actually saw back then. But we still look at the pictures seriously and as real things.
