Over the course of ten years, one man photographed one woman. The man was a photographer. For a photographer, taking photographs may seem only natural.
Yet within the bond of a man and a woman joined together, neither is necessarily a purely visual presence to the other. In the weave of daily life, threaded with shifting emotions and bodily rhythms, there is almost no time in which they truly look at one another. The human eye is, by nature, a cold observer. To see everything laid bare would be the act of a fool. Human beings are fragile creatures, at once absurd and sorrowful, unable to endure such an unflinching gaze.
And yet, this man continued to photograph.
— From Shoji Yamagishi, Karasu Mau (Crows in Flight)
Edited primarily from works published intermittently in Camera Mainichi magazine between 1964 and 1976.
