ESPAÑA GRAND TARDE, FIESTA, VAYA CON DIOS — Ikko Narahara — Kyuryudo — 1969

Few photobooks made by an outsider have entered Spain as deeply as Ikko Narahara’s extraordinary 1969 work. Travelling through the country during his European years, Narahara found a society in which Catholic ritual, bullfighting, religious devotion, festivals, poverty and an intense public life existed beside the beginnings of rapid social change. Rather than constructing a detached documentary survey, he photographed Spain as a sequence of physical and psychological encounters: bodies compressed in crowds, the choreography and mortality of the bullring, young people consumed by fiesta, and the quieter presence of people encountered in towns and villages.

The book unfolds in three movements—Grand Tarde, Fiesta and Vaya con Dios. Fiesta begins with San Fermín in Pamplona before moving south to the Feria de Abril in Seville and summer celebrations in Málaga; Vaya con Dios turns towards towns, villages and their inhabitants, while Grand Tarde confronts bullfighting as a ritual in which spectacle, violence, beauty and death become inseparable. Narahara was photographing a country already beginning to change, and many of these images carry an awareness that the cultures and ways of life before his camera might not remain intact. 

What makes the book exceptional, however, is the way this experience was translated into print. Mitsuo Katsui’s radical design refuses the neutrality of the conventional photographic monograph: dense black-and-white reproductions, fold-outs, saturated colour, typography and abrupt changes of rhythm turn the book into a constructed visual experience. A separate 44-page volume, The Promised Journey, places Narahara’s own commentary alongside Japanese and English text, making explicit that this was not simply reportage from Spain but the record of a journey through which the photographer was also questioning his own position and photographic language. The result belongs simultaneously to Spain and to the extraordinary reinvention of the Japanese photobook during the 1960s—a book in which travel, subjective photography and graphic design become inseparable. 

Technical Sheet
Title: スペイン 偉大なる午後 / España Grand Tarde, Fiesta, Vaya con Dios
Artist / Author: Ikko Narahara (奈良原一高)
Date: 30 October 1969
Edition: First edition
Medium / Materials: Two-volume publication: illustrated hardcover photobook and separate softcover commentary volume The Promised Journey, issued in illustrated slipcase
Dimensions: 32 cm height
Pages: 239 pp. + 44 pp.
Photography / Commentary: Ikko Narahara
Language: Japanese / English
Translation: Mitsu Sawano

Book Design: Mitsuo Katsui, assisted by Akira Mabuchi
Printing: Toppan Printing Co., Ltd. / Hirohashi Seihan Co., Ltd.
Binding: Yamada Taiseido Co., Ltd.
Paper: Mitsubishi Seishi Co., Ltd.
Publisher: Kyuryudo Co., Ltd.
Place of Publication: Tokyo, Japan

Condition: Second-hand. Complete with the original illustrated cardboard slipcase. The books are well preserved; the slipcase shows age-related wear, with rubbing and some damage to the edges and corners.