Hardcover, edition 500 numbered copies, producer Osamu Wataya, Michitaka Ota, design by Akihiko Tsukamoto, with a text by Aki Kusumoto in English and Japanese.

Confronting the challenge of “the abstract photographic landscape… Taiji Matsue takes the genre to a conceptual extreme, doing for the landscape what Ken Ohara did for the human face.” If photography can be seen as fundamentally “a mechanism that reduces the world to a uniform flat surface,” Matsue’s photographs of landscapes around the world, taken throughout the 1990s, produce a geography similarly flattened and “devoid of much of its individuality… The effect is hypnotic, the tenor of Hysteric both beguiling and distinctly uneasy… What begins as an exercise in formal Conceptualism seems to end as a chilling prophecy of an amortized, depopulated world” (Parr & Badger I).

Pages: 188
Place: Tokyo
Year: 2001
Publisher: Hysteric Glamour / Nobuhiko Kitamura
Size: 32 x 30 cm (approx.)

Included in "The Photobook: A History Volume I" by Parr/Badger
>> see more Vol. I picks here

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