Daidō Moriyama

is a Japanese photographer best known for his black-and-white street photography and association with the avant-garde photography magazine Provoke.

Moriyama began his career as an assistant to photographer Eikoh Hosoe, a co-founder of the avant-garde photo cooperative Vivo, and made his mark with his first photobook Japan: A Photo Theater, published in 1968. His formative work in the 1960s boldly captured the darker qualities of urban life in postwar Japan in rough, unfettered fashion, filtering the rawness of human experience through sharply tilted angles, grained textures, harsh contrast, and blurred movements through the photographer's wandering gaze. Many of his well-known works from the 1960s and 1970s are read through the lenses of post-war reconstruction and post-Occupation cultural upheaval.

Moriyama continued to experiment with the representative possibilities offered by the camera in his 1969 Accident series, which was serialized over one year in the photo magazine Asahi Camera, in which he deployed his camera as a copying machine to reproduce existing media images. His 1972 photobook Farewell Photography, which was accompanied by an interview with his fellow Provoke photographer Takuma Nakahira, presents his radical effort to dismantle the medium.

Although the photobook is a favored format of presentation among Japanese photographers, Moriyama was particularly prolific: he has produced more than 150 photobooks since 1968. His creative career has been honored by a number of solo exhibitions by major institutions, along with his two-person exhibition with William Klein at Tate Modern in 2012–13. He has received numerous accolades throughout his career, including the Hasselblad Award in 2019 and the International Center of Photography Infinity Award in 2012.

Career

Early life and career beginnings

Moriyama was born in Ikeda, Osaka in 1938 as Hiromichi Moriyama. Owing to his father's work, his family moved frequently, and Moriyama spent parts of his childhood in Tokyo, Hiroshima, Chiba, and Shimane (his paternal family's home prefecture) before returning to Osaka around the age of 11. In Osaka, Moriyama worked at the studio of photographer Takeji Iwamiya before moving to Tokyo in 1961 to connect with the radical photography collective Vivo, whose work he admired. He eventually found work as an assistant to photographer and Vivo member Eikoh Hosoe, whom he credits with teaching him much of the fundamentals of photographic practice and technique.

As a young man coming of age in 1950s and '60s, Moriyama bore witness to the political unrest (illustrated most vividly in the 1960 Anpo protests), economic revival and mass consumerism, and radical art-making that characterized the two decades following the end of World War II. His first photobook, Nippon gekijō shashinchō (にっぽん劇場写真帖, Japan: A Photo Theater), published in 1968, captures the excitement, tension, anxiety, and rage of urban life during this critical historical juncture through a collection of images, indiscriminate in subject matter, presented in dizzying succession through full-page spreads. The photographs range from ordinary streetscapes featuring blurred faces and garish signage to snapshots alluding to the aggressive redevelopment taking place in Tokyo and the rubble left in its wake, as well as images of nightlife and darker elements of urban life. As the title of the photobook suggests, Moriyama's approach homes in on the spectacle of everyday life in all its ugliness and splendor.

Provoke (1969–70)

In 1965, a series of photographs of preserved human embryos, titled Mugon geki<nowiki/> ("silent theatre", Pantomime), by Moriyama were published in the magazine Gendai no me and caught the attention of avant-garde poet Shūji Terayama. Terayama commissioned Moriyama to provide accompanying images for his experimental theatre and prose works, providing Moriyama with a boost in his early career and connecting him to other avant-garde creatives including Tadanori Yokoo and Takuma Nakahira.

Moriyama is widely recognized for his work associated with the short-lived but deeply influential magazine, which was founded by photographers Takuma Nakahira and Yutaka Takanishi, along with critic Kōji Taki and writer Takahiko Okada in 1968. These visions of everyday life rejected the notion that photography captures a lucid reflection of the world undergirded by a legible ideological argument; rather, they sought to emphasize the fragmentary nature of reality and make evident the photographer's prowling, wandering gaze. The grainy, skewed image features a nude woman smoking a cigarette on a hotel bed—suggestive of the aftermath of a tryst. Her back faces the viewer, while her surroundings are shrouded in dense shadows, giving the camera's gaze a furtive and ominous air.

As stated in the magazine's 1968 manifesto, "[T]he images [eizō] themselves are not ideas. They do not possess the wholeness of concepts, neither are they a communicative code like language....But this irreversible materiality [hikagyakuteki bussitsusei] – reality cut off from the camera – constitutes the reverse side of the world defined by language; and for this reason, [the image] is at times able to provoke the world of language and ideas." Provoke sought to assert photography's role in producing a phenomenological encounter that focused on the bodily and the immediate, moving beyond preconceived notions of truth, reality, and vision to probe questions surrounding the identity of photographic matter and the roles of the photographer, subject, and viewer. Though the collective only produced three issues and a book, First, Abandon the World of Pseudocertainty – Thoughts on Photography and Language (1970), each member continued to publicize their work in close relation to the "era of Provoke," and the magazine has had an immense cultural impact and been the subject of numerous international exhibitions. According to Moriyama, the series was prompted by an experience he had at a train terminal in Tokyo, whereupon he was shocked to see the news of Robert F. Kennedy's assassination on the front page of newspapers scattered all around him. Taking interest in the mediated nature of press images, Moriyama says in an interview with Nakahira that this encounter prompted him to become "determined to negate the values that are attached to one single photograph." Many of the scenes were captured by Moriyama as he drove past them, made evident by the skewed angles, blurry, moving figures, and fragments of road infrastructure that cut across the picture plane. The title of the volume refers to his "stalker-life" attitude towards observing and capturing his surroundings, through the perspective of a cold, detached, solitary watcher. At the same time, the volume maintains a certain open-endedness in its format, lacking any sort of narrative resolution that might typically accompany the trope of a road trip or a hunting excursion, and instead putting forth a sensation of perpetual anxiety and uncertainty through its succession of consistently detached and irresolvable images of subjects and scenes across Japan.

The book contains some of Moriyama's best-known images, including "Stray Dog, Misawa, 1971", which depicts a growling, haggard dog turning its head towards the camera. The image was taken in Misawa, Aomori prefecture, where a large US Air Force base is located (Moriyama shot at other U.S. military bases throughout his career, including at the naval base in Yokosuka.) The introduction of the book was written by pop artist and graphic designer Tadanori Yokoo, who wrote of Moriyama's pictures as being akin to "someone who talks, without looking people in the eye."

In 1974 the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo organized the photography exhibition Fifteen Photographers Today, curated by Tsutomu Watanabe, who had selected Moriyama, Araki and Fukase alongside Shoko Hashimoto, Kazuo Kitai, Masatoshi Naito, Takuma Nakahira, Takao Nikura, Hajime Sawatari, Kishin Shinoyama, Yutaka Takanashi, Shigeru Tamura, Katsumi Watanabe, Shuji Yamada, and Shin Yanagisawa.

<!--After Farewell Photography, which illustrated the photographer's increasingly shift towards self-effacement, material negation, and the disappearance of the subject, he entered a period of silence that was ended in 1981 by the publication of Hikari to Kage ("Light and Shadow") in Shashinjidai magazine. William Klein, Andy Warhol, Yukio Mishima, and Shūji Terayama.

The Shinjuku area is frequent setting for Moriyama's images of urban life. The photographer cites Shinjuku's shadowy, labyrinthine streets and alleys as a source of inspiration and allure, describing the area as having "a strange narcotic effect...something about it that traps me and puts me under a spell."

Format

Moriyama predominantly presents his work in the form of photobooks (and self-published photo magazines), which he describes as open-ended sites, allowing the reader to decide on the sequence of images that they view. Since 1968, he has published more than 150 photobooks. The photobook arose as a popular format in the 1950s and 60s, and were often produced at a small scale and disseminated through bookstores and localized political networks rather than being mass-produced by major publishing houses.

Since the 2000s he has a preference for having a third party work on the formatting and recomposition of the images, as it frees him from the influences of his own memory and filters the images through the eye of an outsider. A collection of Moriyama's writings, compiled from a fifteen-part series published in Asahi Camera beginning in 1983, have been published as an autobiographical photobook titled Inu no kioku ("Memories of a Dog").

Moriyama's photographs are often captured in a 4:5 aspect ratio rather than the 3:2 ratio associated with the 35 mm format, and he has at times cropped his 35 mm photographs in order to achieve his preferred vertical format.

Technique

Moriyama tends to capture images without looking through the viewfinder, so as to separate himself from the detached, scientific, and deliberate cropping produced by the viewfinder lens. He often takes a large volume of photographs of the world as it passes by him, embracing the uncertainty and indeterminacy of encountering the scenes as they reveal themselves during the development process. Between 2008 and 2015, Moriyama revisited Tokyo, with a focus on the Shinjuku district—where much of his early career was spent—to take 86 chromogenic prints ("Tokyo Colour" series, 2008–2015) and black-and-white photographs ("Dog and Mesh Tights," 2014–2015). In 1974 the Printing Show took place at Shimuzu Gallery in Tokyo. Instead of photographs on the walls Moriyama printed a series of his photographs on a photocopy machine, shuffled them and then were staple-bound with silkscreened cover (visitors could choose between two), resulting in the photobook titled Another Country. (The event was restaged in 2011 at Aperture Gallery in New York and the following year at the Tate Modern in London.)

Moriyama rose to prominence in the States after being heavily featured in the landmark group exhibition New Japanese Photography at the Museum of Modern Art in 1974, curated by John Szarkowski and Shoji Yamagishi. Selected as one of thirteen photographers in the show, Moriyama brought a grittier edge that emphasized the rawness of visual encounter, as well as a youthful perspective to the collection of artists, which included older practitioners such as Ken Domon and Shigeru Tamura, avant-garde contemporaries (and mentors to Moriyama) such as Shomei Tomatsu and Eikoh Hosoe, as well as those working in more polished, intellectualized, and observational approaches such as Ken Ohara, Ryoji Akiyama, and Bishin Jumonji. It was followed in 2003 by a retrospective that travelled through Japan and a first exhibition at the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in Paris, where a follow-up was organized in 2016 (Daido Tokyo), for which he was commissioned to create an "immersive" multiscreen projection of black-and-white photographs (Dog and Mesh Tights). Another major show travelled in 2007 from Cologne, Germany, to Seville, Spain and finally to the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. 2012 saw two institutional exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the Tate Modern (with William Klein).

Awards

1967: New Artist Award from the Japan Photo Critics Association
1983: Annual Award from the Photographic Society of Japan
2003: The 44th Mainichi Art Award
2004: Lifetime Achievement Award from The Photographic Society of Japan
2018: French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, Chevalier
2020: Asahi Prize

Solo exhibitions

alt=Exhibition by Daido Moriyama, Daido Tokyo, Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, Paris (2016).|thumb|2016 Exhibition Daido Tokyo at Fondation Cartier in Paris.

Source:

Publications

Photobooks

Writings

Mazu tashikarashisa no sekai o sutero: shashin to gengo no shisō (= "First Abandon the World of Pseudo-Certainty: Thoughts on Photography and Language"). Tokyo: Tabata Shoten, 1970. . With Nakahira Takuma, Takanashi Yutaka and Taki Kōji (Japanese).
Places in My Memory (Memories of a Dog). Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1984. Essays by Moriyama (Japanese).
Memories of a Dog. Final Chapter. Tokyo: Asahi Shinbunsha, 1998. (Japanese).
Revised editions of both books: Kawade Shobo Shinsha, 2001. ISBN 4-309-47414-4 (Japanese).
English translation: Memories of a Dog, Portland, OR: Nazraeli, 2004. ISBN 1-59005-067-3. Edition of 100 copies.
A Dialogue with Photography. Seikyūsha, 1985. Compiled writings by Moriyama (Japanese).
Revised edition: Tokyo: Seikyūsha, 1995 (Japanese).
From Photography/Toward Photography. Tokyo: Seikyūsha, 1995 (Japanese).
Revised edition of A Dialogue with Photography and From Photography/Toward Photography. Tokyo: Seikyūsha, 2006 (Japanese).
How I Take Photographs. Laurence King, 2019. . Co-written with Takeshi Nakamoto.

Compilations and monographs

Mark Holborn (ed.).Record. London: Thames & Hudson, 2017. Selected work from Record No. 1–30. ISBN 978-0-500-54466-2.
Record 2. London: Thames & Hudson, 2024. ISBN 978-0-500-02763-9.
Nogueira Thyago (ed.). Daido Moriyama. Munich/London/New York: Prestel, 2023. ISBN 978-3-7913-8925-7.
Phaidon 55: Daido Moriyama. Text by Kazuo Ishii. London: Phaidon, 2001. ISBN 0-7148-4023-8.
Phillips, Sandra S., Alexandra Munroe, and Daido Moriyama. Daido Moriyama: Stray Dog. San Francisco: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 1999. ISBN 0-918471-50-8.
Photofile: Daido Moriyama. Introduction by Gabriel Bauret. London: Thames & Hudson, 2012. ISBN 978-0-500-41105-6.

Film documentaries

The Past Is Always New, the Future Is Always Nostalgic – Photographer Daido Moriyama (Kako wa itsumo atarashiku, mirai wa tsune ni natsukashii). Written and directed by Gen Iwama. Rapid Eye Movies, 2021.

References

External links

Daido Moriyama filmed interview in Tokyo – TateShots
Moriyama's works at Tokyo Digital Museum
Documentation of recent Moriyama exhibitions
Daidō Moriyama at Artcyclopedia – list of exhibits and image galleries.
Exhibition at the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville, 2007.
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shashasha photobook application – archive of Moriyama's out-of-print photobooks