Rare

Television 1975-1976

Masao MOCHIZUKI

Add to Cart

Checkout This item has been added to your cart

Masao Mochizuki systematically documented a year of Japanese television between 1975-1976, creating an archive of random broadcasts that had been unceasingly consumed over the twelve month period. Using a modified camera, Mochizuki captured multiple images in a single photographic frame and the resulting photo-constructions contain 35-600 single images.
These elaborate montages mirror the erratic fusion of culture, drama and news that the medium transmits on an endless cycle and also the arbitrary way they are consumed by viewers. The details of the stories and events portrayed are lost in a mass of fleeting moments and the narratives are presented with no indication to their significance or gravity. Important international news events are depicted alongside frivolous entertainment, as the medium constantly dispatches its content with a detached rationality.
It seems appropriate that with Japan’s voracious appetite for modern technology, it is a Japanese photographer who has created a document that focuses on the very mechanism that has had such a pivotal role in our perception of the world around us. Television is an intelligently executed body of work and a wonderfully produced title.

Book Size
370 x 370 x 20 mm
Printing
Hardcover in slipcase
Publication Date
2001
Publisher
SNAP-Sha
Tags: television

Masao MOCHIZUKI

望月正夫

Together with the likes of Issei Suda, Masao Mochizuki belongs to the fourth generation of students of the Tokyo College of Photography, a school that has produced numerous prominent photographers. Even though he hadn’t made particularly noteworthy achievements in the 1970s-80s, a time when Japanese photographers were celebrated around the world, his one-man exhibition “Television” in 1998 received a lot of attention also in the West, and a book with the same title that was published in 2001 finally catapulted him to international fame.

Publications of Masao MOCHIZUKI