Lettre à St. Lou

Daido Moriyama
Lettre à St. Lou

Photographs: Daido Moriyama

Text: Daido Moriyama

Publisher: Tokyo: Kawade Shobo Shinsha

Pictures: 127

Year: 1990

Comments: Hardcover with dust jacket as issued, obi is missing. First edition, 1990. Text in english and in japanese. Very good condition, slightly used to extremities, a few marked on the dust jacket.

July, 1827.

One summer day, over a period of 8 hours, the glaring sunlight, which poured down over St.Lou, a small town in Normandy, France, was slowly printed on the layer of an asphalt plate in Camera Obscura, a square box which a man had placed there. The blurred vaque scene of "The back yard with a small dovecote", copied on a plate, became a fossil of light and time, which human beings acquired for the first time, and has remained intact till now. This happened because an elderly ambitious inventing maniac, whose name was Nicéphore Niépce, recorded the view out of a window of his room - his long - standing heartfelt dream - and fossilized it under the name of "Heliography", i.e. a picture drawn by the sun. This was nothing other than the first "photograph" in the world.

Now, I am vacantly sitting in front of a desk, having nearly finished my editing of this photographic collection. The scene of that summer day in St. Lou is constantly projected in the corner of my mind and stays in view while I am trying to write this afterward...

Daido Moriyama