Daido Moriyama

A brief note on an article that appeared in the Guardian earlier this week. I have been meaning to get a short post up since it appeared but have been hampered by a lousy internet connection.

Suitably short on words, this shows a brief but nicely representative selection of his work. It is amazing that he is now in his eighties but still goes out with his camera every day. The flow of images in his self-published Record seems unquenchable, though I must say that now I am beginning to find the volume of stuff that he publishes a bit overwhelming and I have given up trying to keep on top of his output!

He nevertheless remains one of my favourite photographers (funny how now so many of them seem to be Japanese!). Perhaps paradoxically though I do not think of him as an active influence on my own work (unlike, for example, Rinko Kawauchi who has affected some of what I have produced, though admittedly not much of that I have made for the OCA courses) and have never felt much of an urge to emulate his approach or style, or at least not yet.

Here is a copy of the article:

Harsh, blurred and brilliant: the great Daidō Moriyama – in pictures

The faceless city … a modern high-rise.

He is one of Japan’s most renowned photographers, a giant of the Provoke movement whose compelling images take a disturbing view of city life and the chaos of existence

All photographs © Daidō Moriyama

Tue 31 Mar 2020 07.00 BST

Daidō Moriyama emerged from the influential Provoke movement, which began as a magazine in 1968 aiming to ‘free photography from subservience to the language of words’.

His bold, uncompromising style put Japanese photography on the international stage

Moriyama acquired an early reputation as a provocative street photographer. These images are from Daidō Moriyama: A Diary due to open at Foto Colectania Foundation, Barcelona, on 12 March but now postponed.

The photographs due to be seen in this show were drawn from nearly 50 years of work. Moriyama’s images resist chronological reading or thematic division

Reproduction is important to Moriyama. He sometimes took photographs of his photographs, which he would then photograph again

Moriyama continues to work every day, photographing his neighbourhood in Tokyo, but also travelling to America and Europe. His style is simple: stop, take a photo, move on

His work is often abstract but he also creates decadent still lifes out of banal objects, giving them an almost fetishistic quality

His work has been reproduced on coffee mugs, skateboards and T-shirts, reflecting his desire that these images should have a life beyond the exhibition space