IKKO NARAHARA
“EUROPE: WHERE TIME HAS STOPPED”
FIRST EDITION
CLOTHBOUND
LAMINATED SLIPCASE
LAMINATED UNCLIPPED DUST JACKET
KASHIMA KENKYUJO SHUPANKAN
105 B&W PHOTOS
30 COLOR PHOTOS
11¾"X 8"
TOKYO
1967
This is a very collectible and reasonably scarce monograph from my private art book library acquired during the ‘60s and ‘70s and what I believe to be the best condition you will find on the ’net.
CONDITION: NEAR FINE (9.5 out of 10) very well preserved example: undamaged laminated slipcase shows only the slightest wear, hardbound cloth cover boards are flat with sharp corners / tight binding with all pages intact, unmarked and clean; photos are crisp and clear / light signs of handling but no noticeable flaws / for best view, please supersize photo at the very top of this webpage and examine all 12 pictures of actual item carefully for condition
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PACKAGING: Industrial strength, double boxed in cardboard
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The critically acclaimed photobook, "Europe: Where Time Has Stopped" published by Kashima Kenkyujo Shupankan, Tokyo in 1967. Photoeye has provided an exceptional description of the importance of this book, "Like other members of the short-lived but highly influential Vivo agency, Narahara broke with dominant modes of documentary photography, which emphasized story telling, and pursued a more individual and subjective vision.
"Europe: Where Time Has Stopped" earned Ikko Narahara the Japan Photo Critics Association Photographer of the Year Award, The Mainichi Art Award, and the Minister of Education’s Award. The book is cited in Ryuichi Kaneko’s reference work on Japanese Photobooks, "Japanese Photobooks of the 1960s and 1970s".
Narahara who had attributed his personal technique of representation as “personal documents,” carved the path for a new era in the history of Japanese photography through means of an original, comprehensive perspective. This book serves as a personal record of the photographer’s travels in Europe from 1962-1965.
In August 1962, Narahara travelled to Paris in the wake of a request from a fashion magazine, initially planning his visit for three months. However, Narahara who had marked a brilliant debut with his much acclaimed solo exhibition “Human Land” in 1956, had been engrossed in an overwhelmingly active schedule since the start of his career as a ‘photographer.’ Thus in this respect, Europe had granted Narahara’s desire to distance himself from his past environment and glimpse into another world, essentially becoming a place that allowed the photographer to indulge in his own thoughts.
In the Luxembourg Park lovers walked silently, arm in arm, on the boulevard lined by marronniers, their heavy leaves turning yellow; lovers in their twenties were followed by men and women in their thirties, who in their turn were followed by couples in their fifties. The lovers, young and old, walking arm in arm, appeared and then disappeared as if they were a flow of similar geometric figures. I thought I was seeing the whole cycle of man’s life within less than ten minutes. And I thought of the moment of death that would come after they walked away. (…) The lovers who appeared and disappeared in silence seemed outside time. It was as if the figures of photographs had drawn near me for a moment, and then retreated into their own motionless eternity. Such a great moment of revival I called “the moment when time has stopped.” It was a moment pregnant with uncertain premonition; neither “sorrow” nor “loneliness” was the proper word to describe that moment.
Narahara had placed himself in spaces formulated through modes different to that of Japanese sensibility from conclusive realms of the highly artificial, to architectural structures that reflect the culmination of history, as well as the lives that unfold within these contexts. While bearing a strong awareness towards the death as a mere temporary form of existence and the time that elapsed before his eyes, Narahara had initially spent almost half a year consistently travelling throughout various countries. As his life in Europe proceeded to merge with his internal image of Europe, both Narahara’s eyes and interests had gradually begun to shift from the inside towards the outside. Narahara drove an extensive 47,000 kilometers across the continent in his cherished Sunbeam Alpine, and as if framing fragments of Europe, had captured the various moments of his intimate encounters through an array of photographs. The results were first published in Asahi Camera in 1964 under the title of “Europe 64”, and were presented in Camera Mainichi as “Where Time Has Stopped.” These series of works that were later compiled akin to a poetic anthology and finally the 1967 publication of this first photography book, which Narahara himself refers to as “his monologue on Europe,” had evoked in him the spirit of “holding the sky in his hands again.”
