Europe: Where Time Has Stopped

First edition and first printing of the critically acclaimed documentary photobook.

• Ikko Narahara (Japanese).
• Tokyo: Kashima Kenkyujo Shupankan, 1967.
• 105 black-and-white and 30 color photographs, including 5 gatefolds.
• Bound in blue cloth boards.
• Illustrated slipcase with acetate cover.
• With 135 photographs and original post card.

In Narahara's essay "About My Method," he stated, "Even if a subjectivity abstracted from concreteness called human society is once again plunged into the reality of concrete human society of this land, it should not diminish its meaning as a document." A travelogue of sorts, Where Time Has Stopped records the photographer's travels in Europe from 1962-1965. The off-kilter, expressionist compositions bear the unmistakable mark of Klein, yet are entirely more stark and surreal. Rather than giving the viewer a sense of the photographer as plunged into the world, Narahara's compositions possess an uncanny sense of vertigo—of the camera as almost disembodied, floating through the scenes it observes. "More than once," Narahara has said, "I had the impression that the spirit of my photographs achieved a detachment and freedom of the soul close to nothingness: what is called Zen."