Daido Moriyama, Japanese Photographer: Poetry through the lens

Originally published on the 20th October 2012.

In October 2012 I visited an exhibition of Daido Moriyama’s photographs in London’s Tate Modern.

I quote from the exhibition’s brochure:

In a career spanning nearly fifty years, Moriyama is best known for his wild, blurred, grainy style of black and white photography, capturing urban experience on the streets of Tokyo and New York. However, there are many sides to his practice and he also works with colour, polaroid, silkscreen and installation, all of which are included in the exhibition at Tate Modern this autumn.

Born in Ikeda, Osaka, Daido Moriyama first trained in graphic design before taking up photography with Takeji Iwaniya, a professional photographer of architecture and crafts. Moving to Tokyo in 1961, he assisted photographer Eikoh Hosoe for three years and became familiar with the trenchant social critiques produced by photographer Shomei Tomatsu. He also drew inspiration from William Klein’s confrontational photographs of New York, Andy Warhol’s silkscreened multiples of newspaper images, and the writings of Jack Kerouac and Yukio Mishima. (3)

“Take as many photographs you can: it’s the only way to train your eyes, body and emotions.” Daido Moriyama(1)

people steadily lose the landscapes they have accumulated. it’s not likely that anyone can faithfully recall how scenes appeared ten or twenty years ago… i think people continue to live in the present because we forget most every little thing. the remembrances that sneak up on a tired soul may sometimes stir us, but there is no tomorrow in that… where in the world did the era beyond my memories and the people who lived in it disappear to? after time, which we can actually only see now in historical documents, there are memories we carry. after our time, what memories will be carried forth by the people who follow? Daido Moriyama–memories of a stray dog (2)

moriyama’s best work everywhere implies a trauma that must have occurred just outside the limit of our vision, just before we get to the scene, or just beyond the reach of our memory. we feel that what we are getting now is its residual radiation. Leo Rubinfien writing in art in america (2)

“I don’t know how you say ‘nasty’ in English . . . But I want to take a lot of nasty photos. It’s that kind of thing for me.” Daido Moriyama (4)

“I shoot what I want to shoot, everything is open and there is no process of self-censorship except a little sense of fear because sometimes it gets scary.” Daido Moriyama

“Characteristic traits are strong black and white contrasts, grainy and unsharp images, unusual angles and compositional croppings. His sources of inspiration in the end of the 1960s and 70s were William Klein’s street photography from New York (with its rough style and fierce graphic language); Andy Warhol’s silk screens of police photographs (grainy structure and photographs of crime scenes, as in the series Accident, 1969); and Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road (the series On the Road, 1972, photographed from car windows).”

“During my stay, I promised myself to go out and take pictures everyday as long as it wasn’t raining. By bus and train, I went here and there in Hokkaido with my camera. Someties I spent the night out of my appartment but I usually dragged myself all the way back, easting bread and drinking whisky in a cold room”. Daido Moriyama, on his trip to Hokkaido in 1978

Sources:

1.The Guardian, Sarah Phillips, Daido Moriyama’s best photograph: my girlfriend’s legs in fishnets

2. The space in between: the philosopher and the trickster: daido moriyama and nobuyoshi araki

3. LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art): Fracture Daido Moriyama 

4. LACMA (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), Unframed (blog post): Daido Moriyama: “It’s That Kind of Thing For Me”