While searching for “a minimum media for immediately printing photos taken in everyday life and showing them by hand to those around him”, Daido Moriyma launched a self-published photograph magazine Record in 1972.
Although the publication of this magazine was temporarily suspended in May in the following year when No. 5 issue was published, it was revived in 2006 and is continuously published even today.
A digest version of this magazine from No. 1 to No. 30 was published.
The reproduced photos are as large as the original, the postscripts by Moriyama himself are also included, and the number of the photos included amounts to 280.

Record can be said to be his starting point.
Please enjoy a long journey Moriyama has taken as a photographer.

•  Hand-signed copies available
• Language : Japanese

On the occasion of the publication of volume 50 of the Record journal, my works were shown in a long-term slide show event at the AKIO NAGASAWA Gallery in Ginza, from late May until early October.
I visited the venue several times since the start of this program, placed myself in the middle of the 5,000 miscellaneous images that were projected onto every inch of the gallery’s walls by seven projectors, and enjoyed the strange experience of standing there, isolated from daily life, and being hit from all sides by the showers of light. The images that were covering the surrounding walls entirely, were quite certainly slides of my own photographs, but due to the complex, constantly changing entanglement of space and time, the pictures that I looked at nimbly slipped out of my field of vision, and left me feel transformed into a sleepwalker who wanders through far and unknown landscapes.
The strange and chaotic images from Tokyo, Marrakech and New York that were perpetually projected onto the walls, had disconnected from the one who shot them, to pursue the anonymous notion that is supposedly inherent in a photograph. It had become totally irrelevant that I was the one who made them, and before I knew it, the projected images transformed into the very “spirit” that is photography itself.
Witnessing this slide show of my own works was an experience that, even at this point in time, taught me a whole new way of responding to them.

Upon opening the gallery’s door and stepping inside, the visitor was instantly greeted by a curious kind of soundscape.
That unfathomable mix of sounds was composed of all sorts of tones that were recorded at various places in the streets, and layered on top of each other. Including the occasional flirtatious moan of a woman, it was a mysterious noise that gradually percolated into the listener’s mind.
– from afterwords by Daido Moriyama

An exhibition of my photographs just opened at a museum in Sao Paulo, and there are also shows underway at museums in Rome and Beijing. While asking myself how my photographs may look to the people in these faraway places, I’m also in the middle of producing a voluptuous close-up shot of a woman’s cherry-red lips for a 3 x 3 meter billboard on the corner of the Yodobashi Camera building in Tokyo’s Nishi-Shinjuku district. Being the “red lip fetishist” that I am, I didn’t think twice before accepting that job, and working on that one shot gave me a boost and inspired me to walk over to the entertainment district west of the railway overpass, to shoot the crowds of people in the streets. As a result, volume 51 of “Record” is entirely dedicated to the Nishi-Shinjuku neighborhood. It had been a while since I’d last walked and shot in the Nishi-Shinjuku area, and while these photographs were made with my usual attitude, I particularly wonder how they will be perceived this time. On a different note, I’m recently devoting increasing amounts of time reading the “Fuji Nikki,” a diary that the late Yuriko Takeda wrote in the course of thirteen years at the family’s cottage at the foot of Mount Fuji. The further I’m getting into the author’s openhearted descriptions of concrete occurrences in her daily life, the more three-dimensional the events appear to be standing out from the flat text, and once common sentiments and emotions are completely wiped away, I seem to sense the author’s body temperature along with an almost humorous touch. And all the details of the long and troublesome time, disguised as “everyday,” that she had spent waiting, take on a kind of pliantness beyond words, making for nothing more and nothing less than an extraordinary account. For myself, this is another demonstration of conclusive toughness and flexibility, as also combined in the tool that is photography.
(I think I don’t need to mention that Yuriko Takeda was the wife of the late novelist Taijun Takeda, and is the mother of photographer Hana Takeda.)

One evening in early December 2021, I met a woman named Yaco at Akio Nagasawa Publishing in the Ginza area. At the time, I was a little tired of putting only street snaps into the Record journals, and had begun to think about doing things like female portraits. That was when Mr. Nagasawa introduced me to Yaco-san. We spent a while chatting about this and that, and as the conversation went on, as if by accident, she displayed a unique kind of sensitivity, and that instantly helped me make up my mind. The next volume of Record was going to be all about Yaco-san!

Once I had made the decision, things quickly fell into place. Without further discussion, I took her around the dusky Ginza and Yurakucho neighborhoods, and took pictures of her in the rough coat that she was wearing. It was the season when Christmas illuminations were turning every street corner into a gorgeous setting, and as Yaco-san moved around freely and flexibly in front of the camera, we were done with the shooting and returned to the gallery in less than two hours.

After a short break, we did some nude shots on the floors under and above the gallery. Yaco-san undressed without hesitating, and began to strike some casual poses quite naturally before I could even start giving instructions. So all I had to do was to keep releasing the shutter, and once again, the entire session took less than two hours.
I was sure that the records and the memories of that evening, of the photographer and the photographed alike, would casually manifest themselves on the pages of Record.

Even when taking into account my motivation this time, making an entire issue of Record into a Yaco-san special was an exception to the rule I guess. Not that this is something terribly important, but it is issue number 50 after all, so with this one being a special case, from here I’m going to return to my usual pace. Walk, watch, and shoot. This is my rhythm, and this is all that I do. When I met Mr. Nagasawa in a coffee shop in Kamakura the other day, he lightly said to me, “Let’s make it to Record No. 100,” and I lightly said thank you. His commitment to the publication made me very happy. Nevertheless, I can only do one at a time, so next is number 51, and after that, number 52.
Anyway, at this point, Record is the lifework and the lifeline of my photography…

– from afterwords by Daido Moriyama