Another Country in New York (Japanese: 《もう一つの国》ニューヨーク) by Daido Moriyama was photographed in New York City in late 1971, tracing streets, signs, people, interiors, and urban surfaces during his first journey outside Japan. Moriyama approached the city not as a neutral travel record but as an emotional geography. In his 1974 statement, he called New York "the world itself" and compared its lights to memories of a lover. Tokyo was "my country," while New York became a distant yet familiar other shore.
The black-and-white images move among airplanes, hotel rooms, cabs, sidewalks, storefronts, billboards, buildings, and passing figures. Dark grain, blur, high contrast, snapshot framing, and slanted viewpoints produce a restless, sometimes withholding atmosphere. Moriyama often photographed without looking through the viewfinder, giving many scenes an oblique immediacy. Half-frame exposures appear as adjacent or vertically stacked pairings, so recurring motifs and abrupt transitions matter as much as single pictures. The sequence resembles a mutable magazine spread rather than a fixed set of autonomous prints.
Moriyama recalled making 1,500 exposures with a half-frame camera, then contact-printed the negatives after returning to Tokyo. For the Daido Moriyama Printing Show at Shimizu Gallery in Tokyo, held in 1974, he used a Canon U-BIX photocopier to reproduce selected images. He welcomed inconsistent tones and lost detail as properties of copying. In the gallery, sheets were manually collated and side-stapled behind silkscreened paper covers selected by visitors, who waited as the covers dried. Approximately 100 copies were produced, with sequence, cropping, and tonal variation among surviving books.
Ten photographs from the series first appeared in the April 1972 issue of Asahi Camera. The 1974 event established the work as a participatory book-object, and MoMA catalogs a copy in its collection. PPP Editions' 428-page '71-NY accompanied a 2002 Roth Horowitz exhibition and expanded the 1971 material. Akio Nagasawa issued two facsimiles in 2013, while presentations followed at Three Shadows Xiamen in 2015, Tokyo in 2017, and Reflex Amsterdam in 2022. A photograph entered Moriyama's 2023-24 retrospective at The Photographers' Gallery, and a 2025 edition added unreproduced contact sheets.
