Katsumi Watanabe

Shinjuku Guntoden 66/73 [signed]

Tokyo: Baragaho Sha, 1973. Saddle-stapled, photographic wraps. [128] pp. 7 1/8 x 5 in. Black-and-white full-page photographic illustrations on each page. Text in Japanese. Signed on the rear wrapper. Very good; wraps with very minor foxing and creases. Item #6303

A striking photobook of the Tokyo underbelly of the 1960s and ‘70s, signed by the photographer. Katsumi Watanabe was an itinerant street photographer who made a living documenting the residents, workers, clientele, and loiterers of Kabukicho, Shinjuku’s famous red-light district. After taking a portrait, Watanabe would return the next night to deliver the print to his subject (for a fee of 200 yen). Over the course of seven years, Watanabe compiled a remarkable photographic archive of the denizens of Japan's seamy underworld: yakuza, sex workers, bōsōzoku, freaks, dropouts, and other people of the night. The photos, compiled here, are a compelling glimpse into a world rarely recorded and typically defined by transience. Along with portraits, the work contains many shots of groups of people enjoying themselves under the cover of night — indeed, the darkness seems always just about to engulf his subjects.

This book, published in 1973, was Watanabe’s first; he would go on to have a successful career, albeit with an ambivalent relationship to an art world that was not eager to embrace him or the people he photographed. He was, in many ways, a photographer's photographer — considered a master by the likes of Daido Moriyama and Noboyoshi Araki. According to Moriyama, “There is only one photographer who has captured Shinjuku as the stadium of desire, the great wilderness that it actually is: Katsumi Watanabe.”

Copies of this work are extremely rare — signed copies even more so.

Price: $4,750.00