Art in Japan>Photography>Hunter of Light: Daido Moriyama 1965-2003

Original articles on art, artists, architecture, exhibitions, galleries, museums and cultural institutions around Tokyo, Japan.

Hunter of Light: Daido Moriyama 1965-2003

by John McGee

Daido Moriyama, Dog Town, 1971, black-and-white photograph, 30.8x40.4cm

(Photos: © Daido Moriyama)

The Fotomat guy would have probably thought Daido Moriyama was hopeless. Most of his photos are either jerky, out-of-focus, blurred, off-center, blown out or too dark. But that's just the way the artist wanted them. 

One of Japan's best-known photographers, Moriyama (b. 1938) first made a name for himself in the late 1960s and early '70s with this expressionist style of street photography that came to be called are, bure, boke (grainy, blurry, out-of-focus). In one of his most reproduced images, a scruffy, low-slung black loaf of dog turns to give the camera a weary "You talkin' to me?" look (Dog Town, 1971). 

Though Moriyama's work has appeared in numerous exhibitions, photo journals and books, this is his first retrospective in Japan (in 1999 the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art organized a separate retrospective which toured the US and Europe). It covers Moriyama's nearly 40-year career chronologically—from his 1965 "Silent Theater" series to new work in the "Shinjuku" series—through 240 vintage prints (nearly all black-and-white) and 80 books, magazines, posters, paintings and other materials. 

At the age of 21, Moriyama moved from his hometown of Osaka to Tokyo. He lucked into a job as assistant to noted photographer Eikoh Hosoe. Soon, Moriyama was wandering the streets, developing his "no finder" (shoot from the hip), snapshot style. 

Daido Moriyama, Silent Theater, 1965, gelatin 
silver print, 24.9x17.9cm

"Japan Theater" (1967-68) was Moriyama's first important photo collection. The mish-mash of scenes includes backstage views of popular entertainment, e.g. a hairy-chested geisha, cosmetics-strewn tatami. But it also captures some of the novelties wrought by the Economic Miracle of the '60s—e.g. a cool, gray-on-gray corporate interior with a lump of black-suited salarymen standing next to a closet-sized computer or a Grant Wood parody in which a young Stepford couple, arms around an unopened box of laundry detergent and a sealed bag of groceries, stand in front of a row of anonymous apartment blocks.

Around this time, Moriyama experienced the work of a trio of American artists—William Klein's blurred photos of New York street life, Andy Warhol's silkscreened reproductions and Jack Kerouac's free-spirited travel writing—that inspired some of the themes the photographer pursued from 1968-76. He shot from the jittery window of a speeding car for the series "Tokyo Ringway Route 16 'On the Road'" (1968-69). For "Accidents" (1969), Moriyama re-photographed media images—grainy car crashes seen on traffic safety posters, halftone celebrity scandals from cheap tabloids and fuzzy views of dropping bombs on the TV news. In "Farewell Photography" (1972), his images became even more broken, often obliterated into washes of light and dark. 

The exhibition also emphasizes Moriyama's activities in the photographic community throughout this period. He worked on the photo magazine PROVOKE (1969-70), established the Workshop Photography School with Nobuyoshi Araki and others (1974-76), and opened the gallery CAMP (1976-81). 

With "Light and Shadow" (1981-90) and later series, Moriyama's style changed. Small, unstable snapshots were replaced by large, mostly static prints of, for instance, a fedora or a pair of trash cans. 

Moriyama considers a camera "a machine that copies reality." His diverse oeuvre is hard to summarize succinctly because his images, like reality, are imperfect and fleeting. "No matter how many pictures I take," says the photographer, "I can never capture the vast number of fragments of the world that cross with the irreplaceable moments of my life."

This exhibition was held Oct-Nov 2003 at the Kawasaki City Museum in Todoroki Green, Kawasaki, Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan.

©2006 John McGee

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