SUMIHARU WATANABE / Face of Washington Square

SUMIHARU WATANABE
Face of Washington Square (Washington Hiroba no Kao), 1965
First edition
Softcover in photo-illustrated wrappers with slipcase and obi, unpaginated (~200 pages)
18.5 x 26 cm
Hashimoto Yuyudo, Tokyo
Black and white photographs throughout
Japanese text

Watanabe was posted to New York as a correspondent for Nikon USA between 1962 and 1964. As a newcomer to the city, he spent his Sundays walking Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village, photographing the beatniks, chess players, musicians, hippies, dancers, and demonstrators who gathered there. One of the few major Japanese photobooks of the 1960s shot entirely in America - a document of Greenwich Village at the precise moment the Beat generation was giving way to the counterculture. Referenced by Martin Parr, who described it as a fascinating record of the park as a focal point for New York's artistic community. Comparisons to William Klein, Helen Levitt, and Robert Frank. Complete with original printed slipcase and obi band. Genuinely scarce and increasingly recognised as an important document of 1960s New York.