Daido Moriyama’s Farewell Photography remains one of the most radical and influential photobooks ever produced. Originally published in 1972 and reissued by PowerShovel Books in Tokyo in 2006, this revised edition preserves the raw intensity of a work that challenged the very foundations of photographic representation. The book occupies a central place in the history of Japanese photography and is widely regarded as one of Moriyama’s defining achievements.
Rather than documenting the world with clarity or precision, Moriyama embraces instability, fragmentation, and visual noise. Grain, blur, overexposure, scratches, light leaks, and accidental gestures become essential elements of the photographs. The images often appear to be breaking apart before the viewer’s eyes, transforming the book into an exploration of photography itself rather than a record of external reality. 
The sequencing is relentless. Faces, streets, advertisements, shadows, bodies, and fleeting urban details collide in a dense visual rhythm that resists narrative interpretation. Every page contributes to a feeling of disorientation, reflecting Moriyama’s desire to push photography beyond conventional ideas of beauty, objectivity, and meaning. What emerges is a deeply personal vision of postwar Japan filtered through movement, memory, and uncertainty.
The PowerShovel Books edition is particularly significant because the original negatives and prints no longer exist. The publisher reconstructed the project directly from an original 1972 copy, producing a larger-format volume that amplifies the physical presence of the images while remaining faithful to the spirit of the original publication. The absence of text allows the photographs to communicate entirely through their visual force.  
More than fifty years after its first appearance, Farewell Photography continues to feel remarkably contemporary. Its rejection of technical perfection anticipated many of the visual strategies that would later become commonplace in contemporary photography and publishing. For collectors of Rare Photobooks and anyone interested in the evolution of the photobook as an artistic medium, this volume stands as a landmark publication whose influence extends far beyond Japanese photography.
Farewell Photography is not simply a photobook; it is a radical statement about the possibilities and limitations of the photographic image, created by one of the most influential photographers of the twentieth century.