UK77: Digging my way to London - Shinro Ohtake

OHTAKE, Shinro. 
UK 77: Digging my way to London. 
First edition. 4to. [circa 400pp]. Black boards in dust wrap with obi. Colour and b&w plates throughout. English and Japanese texts. Tokyo: Getsuyosha, 2004. 

Beautiful travel diary of London in 1977 with photographs, sketches and observations including striking collages assembled from British ephemera. “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.” Parr/Badger vol.3.