220 x 278 mm

soft cover, 120 pages, signed

Record is the personal magazine which Daido Moriyama first self-published in 1972-1973, intended as monthlies, until the rebirth of the project in 2006. Over the years, Record has become the artist's personal diary and notebook. Or, as he likes to put it, his 'lifeline' that runs underneath the numerous projects that punctuate his existence.

As I get older with the camera in my hand, I realize that all the different things that I depict in my photographs are ultimately rooted in my childhood memories, the various things I have seen and experienced in the postwar years of the early 1950s. My memories of wandering from one town to another for a while after the war have piled up at the bottom of my conscious mind, and it appears to me that they are reflected in the myriad images I've been capturing as a street snap photographer, responding to my index finger as it releases the shutter. In other words, regardless of whether I was aware of it at the place and time of shooting, it seems that the majority of my photographs represent an instant communion with the here and now that is established through some kind of time tunnel. People often tell me that it is difficult to tell about my photographs when they were taken, and that they cannot pin them down to a certain age, which is perhaps another indicator that highlights this very character of my work. I guess the various images that I capture in my photographs originate from my memories of landscapes and sceneries in postwar Japan, and the way they initially appeared to a young boy who was yet to make his own substantial life experiences. The time we call the "present" is always linked to both the past and the future, and today is nothing but a connector between yesterday and tomorrow. After all, taking a photograph is an act of incidentally memorizing a certain point in an endless time tunnel.

Daido Moriyama, the afterword of Record n°38