Name: Tadanori Yokoo. PUSH. A Visual Diary.
Availability: InStock

Published by Kodansha in Tokyo in 1972, PUSH is a visual diary made by Tadanori Yokoo during the two-year hiatus he took from work after being hospitalised in a 1970 car accident. At the time, Yokoo was at the height of his fame as a graphic designer, having already produced the posters and book covers that would define Japanese postwar pop graphics. The accident pulled him out of the studio. PUSH is the record of what he made instead: essays, sketches, notes, and a sustained collaboration with three of the most important photographers of the period. The book runs to 246 pages of textual and visual essays, illustrated throughout with colour photographs by Kishin Shinoyama and black-and-white self-portraits by Daido Moriyama and Tadashi Kurahashi. Softcover in printed wraps, housed in the original publisher's slipcase, with the original Obi band still attached. Approx. 19.5 by 13 cm, in-octavo format. Text in Japanese. The front cover, designed by Yokoo himself, shows a hand wrapped around the design, echoing the pointing-finger motif that runs across his earlier book covers. Yokoo's influences in this period included the Push Pin Studio of Milton Glaser and Seymour Chwast in New York, alongside Akira Kurosawa and Yukio Mishima, and PUSH sits at the moment those references compress into a single autobiographical object. Sourced for M.I.G. by Paris Image Unlimited as part of a thirty-three-title curation of rare art, photography, and design books. A reference for anyone tracking postwar Japanese graphic design, the Provoke-era photography around Moriyama, or the artist's book as a format.