David Bowie Spiritual Force
USE THE SPIRITUAL FORCE. THIS IS THE DAVID BOWIE BY MASAYOSHI SUKITA BOOK PUBLISHED IN JAPAN IN 1992. WE CAME TO IT LATE. THE WHOLE WESTERN WORLD
WAS LATE ON THIS ONE. THREE, ALMOST FOUR, DECADES OF BOWIE
FANDOM AND WE DIDN'T KNOW THAT THIS WAS THE ONLY BOOK THAT EVER REALLY MATTERED.
It was and is the best Bowie book ever from the minute we saw these 1980 pictures. And now you are all working from home. Missing your commute. It's madly appropriate. A meme waiting to happen.
Must have been an urban myth, that Japanese audiences sat quietly appreciative through rock concerts. Not from the look of this 1973 first visit to Japan by Bowie and the Spiders from Mars. They go wild!
Bowie: "I got carried away enough to perform an impromptu strip and and gave my best shot as a 120lb sumo wrestler."
Sukita's first photographs of Bowie. In London in 1972. The whole session lasted two hours. There are seven great portraits to begin this book. Sukita kept shooting Bowie up to and beyond the publication of Spiritual Force
in 1992.
'Space Samurai'. 1973. In Kansai Yamamoto. In New York.
You'll know this as the cover of Heroes. The shoot took place in Tokyo in one day. But there was way more than just one picture. There were some seriously good cover options. This book has eighteen of them printed as full pages.
This may have come near the end of the session :)
And the day ends.
Spiritual force, or ki, is everything. And without ki, there is nothing.
We may be as skeptical as we are mystical. But we believe in Bowie.
And this shoot. Considered (by us) as one of the finest examples of any person in front of any photographer's camera. In all space and time - completely and utterly perfect. The whole book is charmed. Two lives of two great artists in a great many pictures. It has SPIRITUAL FORCE and mystical grace (but that was found in translation).
We have been tracking these books down during lockdown. And now. Three copies. To complete you. Hit the blue button below.