UK 77: Digging My Way to London by Shinro Ohtake
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Publisher: Getsuyosha Ltd, Tokyo
Year: 2007
Format: Hardcover with dust jacket
Edition: First
Condition: Very good
An established Japanese artist since the 1980s, best known as a painter, Shinro Ohtake has produced dozens of books incorporating collage, drawing, painting, sculpture as well as photography. In 1977 at age 22 Ohtake spent time In London documenting through a reduced photography style, drawing, painting and obsessive scrapbooks of ephemera. What emerges is a grim portrait of England still mired in the drab left overs of the 60s but with odd flashes of excitement; on the cusp of the emergence of Punk. Moreover it is a particularly lonely portrait of youth with the artist himself sketching figures in pubs and parks and on trains, collecting matchbooks and bus tickets and traipsing the streets, photographing frenetically.