Counting Grains of Sand 1976-1989

Hiromi Tsuchida
Counting Grains of Sand 1976-1989

Photographs: Hiromi Tsuchida

Publisher: Toseisha

116 pages

Year: 1990

ISBN: 4-924725-05-8

Comments: Hardcover under dust jacket, 26,8 x 35 cm, b&w photographs. First edition. In very good condition.

This book comprises black and white photographs of crowds and public spaces taken from the mid-1970's until 1989 by Japanese photographer Hiromi Tsuchida.

Born in Fukui Prefecture in 1939, Hiromi Tsuchida studied engineering before enrolling in the Tokyo College of Photography in 1965 where he was later to return as a professor. He became a freelance photographer in 1971.

After working as a commercial photographer, from 1964 through 1966 Tsuchida studied at the Tokyo College of Photography in Hiyoshi, Yokohama, where he learned a conceptual approach to the medium from the noted critic Koen Shigemori. okushin was his first major series, published across several issues of the magazine Camera Mainichi before the pictures were collected in a book. The project was the result of his travels through Japan in the early to mid-1970s, as he sought out ways of life not yet homogenized by the capital flowing from urban centers.

Whereas in Zokushin Tsuchida dealt with people in rural areas soon to be swallowed up by urban ways of life, in his next major series, Counting Grains of Sand (1990), he trained his gaze firmly on the inhabitants of major cities. The book starts with snapshots of a few scattered individuals, but eventually more and more figures fill the frame, culminating in images of the crowd that gathered in front of the Imperial Palace after the death of Emperor Hirohito in 1989. Thousands of men and women are packed into each of the final photographs, revealing the wry meaning of the title: people are no more than grains of sand, infinitesimal parts of a vast collective.

— Daniel Abbe