Daido Moriyama: Remix

by Daidō Moriyama (Photographer), Patrick Remy (Editor)

Looking at a collection of photographs by Daido Moriyama is like hurtling through the city in a cab, spinning your head from side to side, up and down, to take in all the action. And the action doesn't stop with the click of Moriyama's shutter. As critic Patrick Remy notes in his introduction, "He endlessly plunges into his contact prints, tirelessly reprints his images, re-centers them, prints them horizontally or vertically to achieve the desired format at the time... enough to make you lose yourself in the maelstrom of his photos (his complete works list 5,758 references)." Close-ups of red, red lips and meticulously manicured hands (except for a bandage on the index finger--what happened?), snowy cityscapes, lonely hotel rooms, storefronts, beautiful women and a pig--no subject escapes him. Like Atget, whom he admires, Moriyama freezes urban evanescence, and like Hosoe, whom he assisted, he uncovers the intimate.

288 pages, Paperback

First published June 15, 2005

About the author

Daidō Moriyama (Japanese: 森山 大道, Hepburn: Moriyama Daidō, born October 10, 1938) is a Japanese photographer best known for his black-and-white street photography and association with the avant-garde photography magazine Provoke.

Moriyama began his career as an assistant to photographer Eikoh Hosoe, a co-founder of the avant-garde photo cooperative Vivo, and made his mark with his first photobook Japan: A Photo Theater, published in 1968. His formative work in the 1960s boldly captured the darker qualities of urban life in postwar Japan in rough, unfettered fashion, filtering the rawness of human experience through sharply tilted angles, grained textures, harsh contrast, and blurred movements through the photographer's wandering gaze. Many of his well-known works from the 1960s and 1970s are read through the lenses of post-war reconstruction and post-Occupation cultural upheaval.

Moriyama continued to experiment with the representative possibilities offered by the camera in his 1969 Accident series, which was serialized over one year in the photo magazine Asahi Camera, in which he deployed his camera as a copying machine to reproduce existing media images. His 1972 photobook Farewell Photography, which was accompanied by an interview with his fellow Provoke photographer Takuma Nakahira, presents his radical effort to dismantle the medium.

Although the photobook is a favored format of presentation among Japanese photographers, Moriyama was particularly prolific: he has produced more than 150 photobooks since 1968.

Reviews

[tenten · Rating 2 out of 5]

Good selection of photos but the print quality is bad. This (over-priced) book is also very poorly produced. Pages got detached from cover as soon as I unpacked the book.

Do not buy this crap.