Untitled (hiyoshi-mamoru)

A twenty-seventh untitled work by Hiyoshi Mamoru. His place in the history of Japanese printmaking is that of a social-documentary practitioner whose subjects were more people than places, more activities than aesthetics, more the ordinary texture of life than its celebrated highlights. This orientation gives his work a particular kind of value — not the value of the masterpiece that transcends its time, but the value of the careful observer who preserves what his contemporaries took for granted.