Yoichi Midorikawa was a photographer born in Okayama Prefecture in 1915. While running a dental clinic in Okayama City, he continued to produce photographs, capturing numerous landscapes of Japan, including the Seto Inland Sea. He is also known for his fantastical color works using multiple exposure and solarization, and was sometimes described as a “magician of color.”
Scenic Beauty of Japan was published in 1977 as Volume 3 of Asahi Sonorama’s Sonorama Photo Selection series. Composed of black-and-white photographs of seas and mountains across Japan, the book offers a compact overview of Midorikawa’s work as a photographer devoted primarily to landscape.
Although Midorikawa is strongly associated with color photography, this volume presents landscapes of mountains, rivers, and coastlines throughout Japan in black and white. Through photographs of light, clouds, water surfaces, and mountain ranges, the book conveys Midorikawa’s formal sensitivity and poetic approach to landscape. It was published as part of the early lineup of the Sonorama Photo Selection series, following Takeji Iwamiya’s Sado.
Sonorama Photo Selection 3: Scenic Beauty of Japan Yoichi Midorikawa Asahi Sonorama, 1977 217 × 207 × 15 mm Good condition for its age
