The Fractured World of Daido Moriyama
Daido Moriyama spent his youth haunted by two questions: ‘what is photography?’, ‘why am I taking photographs?’ Throughout his career, the Japanese artist has repeatedly returned to these questions, using his camera to investigate the essence of photography. Eschewing the highly-polished photographic styles popular in Japan during the 1960s, Moriyama aimed to shine a light on the fragmentary nature of life, revealing how, as he told the FT, ‘in the most common and everyday, in the world of the most normal people … there is something dramatic, remarkable, fictional.’ His use of high contrast black and white, alongside the are bure boke (‘grainy, blurry, out-of-focus’) style he helped pioneer, transforms images of empty streets, discarded trash, and blurry commuters into ambiguous snapshots that pulsate with an uneasy tension. It is precisely an engaged, physical reaction that Moriyama and his peers aimed for, rejecting the concept of the objective photographer in favour of exploring image making as a point of bodily contact not only between photographer and subject, but between image and viewer. Moriyama’s photos do not exist to simply be looked at; they are there to be felt. Shining a light on how Moriyama used his camera to interrogate the world around him, The Photographers’ Gallery’s retrospective brings together over 200 works – including images, videos, and books – across its four floors. Marking the first time the gallery has devoted its entire space to one artist, Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective is also the artist’s first solo show in the UK.
Organised chronologically, the exhibition begins with Moriyama’s 1960s work for Japanese magazines. Against the backdrop of Japan’s Golden Sixties, where the development of a highly export-driven economy resulted in massive economic growth, rising quality of life, new technology, and consumer culture, avant-garde artists including Moriyama used photography as a tool to protest the sanitation of everyday life. Sunbathers on Zushi beach are transformed into a claustrophobic amalgamation of iridescent, fleshy bodies. Reduced to unidentifiable figures, an everyday scene of relaxation is reshaped into a critique of Japan’s massive population spike during the period. Moriyama’s aim to reveal the ‘distance between real events and their images’ finds its apex in his work focusing on accidents. In one, a photo of a car crash from a National Police Agency poster is metamorphosised into an otherworldly scene seeped in moody glamour. In ‘Shinjuku 25 hours’, people and bodies are blurred and hazy, appearing to drift in and out of a world that is at once clearly our own, and yet utterly alien. If a photograph assures the viewer it is ‘revealing the truth’, as Linda Gordon notes, Moriyama’s work instead stresses the ambiguous nature of images.
It is precisely these ‘confused visions of everyday life’ that Moriyama sought to expose with street photography. The noisy nature of many of his pictures, where civilians rush across the city, or fill the streets like anonymous clouds, adds a pertinent sense of anxiety, their fragmented bodies speaking to the socially disjointed nature of city life. The images also capture the clash between Japanese traditionalism and American influences that came to a head after the Second World War. Moriyama was less interested in overtly criticizing these developments than his peers – most notably Shomei Tomatsu, who remains best known for an image of a watch frozen at 11:02, the exact time the atomic bomb exploded in Nagasaki – than he was in capturing the peculiarity of his time. The grainy nature of his work lends this drama a shaky tone, capturing a world in flux and flow, as unstable as his images. Indeed, Moriyama described it as ‘an era of devastation … human beings are headed toward decline.’
However, Moriyama’s street photography is not just interested in cultural developments, but is also focused upon the bodies of women. In one striking image for Asahi Journal, a barefoot woman runs down a dark, debris-filled tunnel. With nothing but darkness ahead of her, exactly what she hopes to find, or escape from, is unclear. The low angle lends the image a predatory feeling, whilst simultaneously functioning to reveal a glimpse of her buttocks, adding a voyeuristic element to the image.
The complicated presentation of women is foregrounded in his work for the short-lived, but highly influential, Japanese magazine PROVOKE, described by Yukihito Kono as not so much a photography magazine, ‘but rather a radical act of defiance against dominant forms of art, politics, philosophy and criticism, and against society of that time.’ For the ‘Eros’ issues, Moriyama photographed a nude woman in a series of erotic poses. Her face obscured, her body fragmented by the camera, she becomes unreadable, a collection of grainy body parts that both invite and reject visual consumption. While the issue aimed to explore the relationship between images and fetishism, this fractured female body repeatedly appears throughout Moriyama’s work. Elsewhere in the exhibition, close-up photographs of a woman’s fishnet-adorned legs and groin are placed below images of a hollow-looking gallery; both woman and gallery are presented as objects to be entered. Beneath this, a series of discarded shoes heightens the fetishistic feel, inviting the viewer to imagine the erotic circumstances that led to their abandonment. Moriyama, who was driven by ‘his physical reactions’, saw ‘black and white photography [as] erotic … due to my body’s instinctive response’; the bodily experience of viewing photographs encourages the viewer to take on Moriyama’s perspective, occupying an uncomfortable position somewhere between critic and voyeur.
The physically involved experience of viewing Moriyama’s work finds its apex in Farewell Photography, one of the best realised sections in the exhibition. Originally a 1972 book created during a period he felt the world was ‘fragmenting’, Moriyama brought together rejected negatives, film ends, media fragments, and personal essays to convey his ‘increasingly radicalised distrust of photographic reality.’ Covering two walls that surround the visitor, the photographs bear down upon the viewer, with no borders between images to separate them or offer respite. While Moriyama claims he only ever aims to ‘extract and record things around me, without any pretence’, the total immersion in his unique vision Farewell Photography demands from the viewer instead recalls Joan Didion’s belief that writing is ‘the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act.’
A brief respite comes in the form of a small book room where visitors are invited to look through Moriyama’s publications, experiencing his work as intended. Whilst involved in numerous exhibitions, Moriyama maintains his true interest in photography lies in producing books. Often printed without margins, the reader, as Hayashi Michio notes, is forced to literally touch the images as they turn the page. Stressing the tactile nature of photography, the design reinforces the idea that viewing photographs is not a detached, immaterial experience, but rather one that is experienced through the body. In Moriyama’s world, objectivity is a myth.
The exhibition concludes with extracts from Moriyama’s ongoing Record publication. Employing colour alongside black and white, the images still maintain their harsh feeling. Moriyama evidently remains as interested in ever in the dirt and trash of daily life, capturing random street corners and discarded magazines. Asserting that he ‘could never see the city with an old man’s eyes’, his current output is indeed invested with the same inquisitive nature as his earlier work, reflecting an artist constantly questioning the nature of photography and image making.
Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective runs at The Photographers’ Gallery until 11th February 2024. Head here for more info.
All images courtesy of The Photographers’ Gallery; Daido Moriyama/Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation.