Conductors of the Moving World by Brad Zellar

 Conductors of the Moving World is a really beautiful new book from Alec Soth's Littlebrownmushroom imprint.

 Made by hand in an edition of just 500 I would have recommended you rush out and buy one, unfortunately it sold out yesterday. Good news for the Japanese Tsunami relief (which is where all the proceeds are going) but bad news for tardy book collectors!

 Like the earlier Bedknobs and Boomsticks by Trent Parke this will no doubt be turning up on Amazon with a vastly inflated price before long.

In the autumn of 1972, a delegation of Japanese police officials visited the United States to study traffic control in several large cities, including New York, Las Vegas, and Los Angeles. The unofficial photographer for the delegation was Eizo Ota, an inspector with the law enforcement department of the Yamanashi Prefecture, and he produced a record of the group’s travels that might best be described as forensic tourism.

Using Inspector Ota’s snapshots as launching points, Brad Zellar plundered traffic manuals, haiku anthologies, the Watergate transcripts, and The Godfather for textual inspiration. The mysterious result is a Zen travelogue through 1972 America.

From a collection of 60 C-Prints, a mix-and-match assortment of 17 will be hand-tipped into individual volumes, making each book a singular work of art.