Daidō Moriyama

Moriyama was born in Ikeda, Osaka in 1938 as Hiromichi Moriyama.[3] 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.[4]^: 208

From the ages of 16 to 20, he worked in graphic design before pivoting to photography in his early 20s after purchasing an inexpensive Canon IV Sb purchased from a friend.[5] 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.[6][7]^: 73 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.[8]^: 270[4]^: 207 Yet for the three years he spent working for Hosoe, Moriyama did not take any photographs of his own until Hosoe, out of impatience, urged him to show him some of his own work.[4]^: 207

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 hones in on the spectacle of everyday life, in all its ugliness and splendor.[9]

In 1965, a series of photographs of preserved human embryos, titled 'Mugon geki' ('Silent Theatre'), by Moriyama were published in the magazine Gendai no me and caught the attention of avant-garde poet Shūji Terayama.[8]^: 269–70 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.[8]^: 270 His connection to Nakahira, a founding member of the photography magazine Provoke, eventually led to his participation in the publication beginning with the second issue in 1969.[10]

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.[11] The publication popularized the "are, bure, bokeh" style, translated as "grainy/rough, blurry, and out-of-focus," an aesthetic rebuttal to the dominant European-style photojournalism style (exemplified by Ken Domon's realist approach) and straightforward commercial work that dominated the Japanese photography scene at the time.[11][12]^: 243 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.[12]^: 243

Eroticism and masculinized subjectivity are often associated with Moriyama's contributions to the magazine, as evidenced by works such as Eros (1969), featured in the second issue of the publication.[13] 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."[14]^{: 232–233} 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.[14]^: 232

In 1968, Moriyama began producing a series focused on the theme of "equivalence" using images featured in mass media as his source material.[15] 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.[16]^: 392 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."[16]^: 393 Moriyama photographed images reproduced from different mass media, including a television still of Lyndon B. Johnson announcing the suspension of the bombing of North Vietnam, newswire shots of Richard Nixon shortly after winning the presidential election, and the corpses of brutally killed Vietcong soldiers, along with the aforementioned image of Robert F. Kennedy.[15]^: 464 Moriyama treated the camera as a device that copies reality and thus produces "equivalents," rendering insignificant the distance that the original photographs, the endlessly reproduced press images, and Moriyama's own versions have from the initial event.[15]^: 465 The twelve-part series was published in Asahi Camera alongside his own texts, where he describes the unpredictability of fate and the precariousness of human experience, believing that the camera has the capacity to reveal the "possibility of tragedy [that] has somehow seeped into the surrounding environment."[8]^: 275

Published in April 1972, Shashin yo sayōnara ("Farewell Photography") emerged within the context of Japan's aggressive cultural and economic revival—best exemplified in the creative sphere by Expo '70—and continued suppression of left-wing politics, as illustrated by the failure of the 1970 Anpo protests and the subsequent renewal of the United States-Japan Security Treaty.[15]^: 470 The photobook, as suggested by the title, takes a nihilistic turn from his prior work, turning its attention towards the incidental and evocative nature of photography rather than the visual subject itself.[7]^: 74[8]^: 283 The images highlight the physical detritus of the photographic process, such as the edges of discarded film, flecks of dust, and light leaks, along with the material dimensions of image-making as evidenced through the sprocket holes on negative strips and the brand names of the film, challenging the indexical relationship between photographer, camera, and image and the established conventions of viewing photographs as referents of reality.[7]^: 74[8]^: 283

Inspired by the liberatory and indeterminate qualities of Sal Paradise's journey in Jack Kerouac's On The Road, Moriyama borrowed a friend's old Toyota and embarked on a solo road trip across Japan, capturing photographs along the trip that would become the basis for Karyūdo (A Hunter), a photobook published in June 1972 as the tenth installment of the series "Gendai no me" (The Modern Gaze).[17] 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.[8]^: 289[18]

The book contains some of Moriyama's best-known images, including Stray Dog (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.[19][20] 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."[8]^: 268 The book was re-released in 2011 with the addition of new commentary by Moriyama.[21][18]

Moriyama's work began to wane in the 1970s in tandem with the sweeping reforms and social changes that took place in Japan throughout the 1960s and 70s. 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.[15]^: 472 He has continued to shoot commercial and artistic work over the decades both in and outside of Japan, and is one of the most active and prolific contemporary photographers in Japan.

Moriyama's work, through intimately engaged with the intricacies of social life and the image-laden nature of modern society, did not aspire to the same tendencies of social reportage exhibited by his contemporaries during the 1970s.[22][19] Instead, his approach takes into account the futility of the medium in reproducing the reality of his surroundings, the inherently fragmentary nature of the world, and the indelible presence of the photographer in all images, lurking or haunting the sphere of his subjects.

Influences cited by Moriyama include Seiryū Inoue, Shōmei Tōmatsu, William Klein, Andy Warhol,[23] Eikoh Hosoe, Yukio Mishima, and Shūji Terayama.[24]

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."[25]

Moriyama often presents his work in the form of photobooks, which he describes as open-ended sites, allowing the reader to decide on the sequence of images that they view.[26] Since 1968, he has published more than 150 photobooks.[27] 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.

He has cited 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.[28]^: 24–27 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 35mm format, and he has at times cropped his 35mm photographs in order to achieve his preferred vertical format.[29]

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.[10]^: 210

While Moriyama is most recognized for his black-and-white film photography, he has been shooting with color since the 1970s, and since the late 2000s has turned increasingly to compact digital photography, now working almost exclusively in this medium.[5]^: 78–79 From time to time, he has also shot Polaroid images, which he treats as "tiles" in installation settings, exhibiting them in groups rather than as discrete photographs.[29]

In 1970, he helped produce the Asahi Journal's new color photography series Dai go shōgen ("The Fifth Quadrant") and published photo essays on new development projects in Osaka and Tokyo, cherry blossoms in Osaka, and American military base towns in the Kantō region. These projects employed his unconventional framing styles along with white balance and color exposure distortions that enhanced the uncanny, unsettling features of the world around him.[8]^: 281

Due to his tendency to take a large number of shots when photographing, Moriyama finds the digital format more amenable to his needs, and rejects critics who fixate on the preciousness of film photography.[5]^: 79 In response to a question posted by writer Takeshi Nakamoto's regarding Moriyama's advice for beginner street photographers, Moriyama states, "Get outside. It’s all about getting out and walking. That’s the first thing. The second thing is, forget everything you’ve learned on the subject of photography for the moment, and just shoot. Take photographs—of anything and everything, whatever catches your eye. Don’t pause to think."[5]^: 11

Daido Tokyo at Fondation Cartier pour l’art Contemporain, Paris in 2016 was the first major solo show to display his color photographs.[30] 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).[30]

• Record No.1. Self-published, 1972.
• Record No.2. Self-published, 1972.
• Record No.3. Self-published, 1972.
• Record No.4. Self-published, 1973.
• Record No.5. Self-published, 1973.
• Record No.6. – Record No.39. Tokyo: Akio Nagasawa, 2006–2018. Various individual editions.

• 4. 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. OCLC 53405730. With Nakahira Takuma, Takanashi Yutaka and Taki Kōji.
• The Japanese Box – Facsimile reprint of six rare photographic publications of the Provoke era, Edition 7L / Göttingen: Steidl, 2001.
• Terayama. Tokyo: Match and Company Co., 2015. English and Japanese editions. With text by Shuji Terayama and an afterword by Satoshi Machiguchi, "The Spell Moves On."
• Dazai. MMM label 5. Tokyo: Match and Company Co., 2014. With a text by Osamu Dazai, "Villon's Wife."
• Odasaku. Tokyo: Match and Company Co., 2016. With a short story by Sakunosuke Oda, "At the Horse Races," and an afterword by Satoshi Machiguchi.
• Teppo yuri no Shateikyori. Tokyo: Getsuyosha, 2017. With haiku in Japanese by Misa Uchida.
• Witness #2 (Number Two): Daido Moriyama. Portland: Nazraeli, 2007. By Moriyama, Emi Anrakuji, and Ken Kitano. ISBN 1-59005-199-8.