I spotted this title which is currently up for auction at Photo-eye auctions. I was not familiar with Yoshida’s work; since I cannot afford the starting auction bid I checked for the title at bookfinder.com and discovered she also published a book titled Black is Beautiful, described as “a book originally published in a different format in 1972. Octavo. Much of the book is text, but there are numerous shot in New York when Yoshida worked at MoMA.” The available copies of this title are from a 1993 edition, also published by Kodansha, Tokyo. There were no additional images from the books online that I could find and our library here doesn’t seem to have any of her titles.
Harlem Black Angels. Photographs by Ruiko Yoshida. Text by Hajime Kishida. Kodansha, Tokyo, 1974. Quarto. First edition. Stiff photo-illustrated wrappers. Original acetate jacket and printed obi (belly band). Black-and-white reproductions. Text in English and Japanese.
Ruiko Yoshida’s photographs of Harlem in the early 1970s brilliantly capture various aspects of the culture and the times, showing a side of the U.S. that she felt her Japanese contemporaries knew little about. In the process she created a compelling work that offers an incisive critique of racial hierarchies in the U.S. that, despite its deeply felt humanism, is missing from Bruce Davidson’s East 100th Street.
