Black and White anti-aesthetics: Daido Moriyama
There is an untold number of different photography styles, but the broad classification often encompasses two non-confrontational groups: studio photography and street photography. Street photographers, unlike studio photographers, try not only to depict the object but rather express emotions and secret yearnings of both the person being photographed and the photographer. One of the greatest contemporary street photo artists is Daido Moriyama from the land of Rising Sun.
A Japanese black-and-white documentary photographer was born in 1938 in Ikeda, Osaka seven years before the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Owning to his father’s work, who was an insurance agent, most of his childhood he spent traveling across the country. Maybe because his family moved so frequently, or because of his closed personality Moriyama didn’t want to make friends and preferred lonely city walks even as a child.
Thanks to this habit, he developed a phenomenal visual perception and ability to grasp incredibly cinematic scenes in the brevity of street life. His shots, that appeared in 1960-s, will be dramatically spontaneous, with harsh contrast and often blurred.
A Japanese black-and-white documentary photographer was born in 1938 in Ikeda, Osaka seven years before the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Owning to his father’s work, who was an insurance agent, most of his childhood he spent traveling across the country. Maybe because his family moved so frequently, or because of his closed personality Moriyama didn’t want to make friends and preferred lonely city walks even as a child.
Thanks to this habit, he developed a phenomenal visual perception and ability to grasp incredibly cinematic scenes in the brevity of street life. His shots, that appeared in 1960-s, will be dramatically spontaneous, with harsh contrast and often blurred.
Daido Moriyama "Black and White Anti-Aesthetics"
Subscribe and read about Master of sensual photography! This will help us to produce more quality material exclusively for our subscribers!
By clicking on the button, you consent to the processing of your personal data
«Photography is a fossil of light and time».
In 1961 Daido moves to Tokio with purpose in mind – his dream was to become a member of a radical in those times group of photographers VEVO. Having a reference from one of his influential friends, he visits VEVO headquarters where he meets young street photographers (interestingly, they also mostly made black-and-white images) Eikoh Hosoe and Shōmei Tōmatsu, but learns to his disappointment that the group ceases to exist in a week!
But chasing his dream, Moriyama literally begs Hosoe to take him as an assistant. At some flea market he buys a book by a classical American novelist Jack Kerouac “On the road” and inspired by the author’s trips, Moriyama began to take photographs of accidental encounters, chaotic movements and momentary street scenes.
With this idea in mind, he starts to roam Japan by hitchhiking. He liked to travel with the drivers who were willing to take him any time of day and night and drive him along new highways stopping by abandoned cafes and giving him opportunity to photograph everything through a car window.
Three years later Moriyama understands that he can work like that himself without being an assistant to Hosoe.
But chasing his dream, Moriyama literally begs Hosoe to take him as an assistant. At some flea market he buys a book by a classical American novelist Jack Kerouac “On the road” and inspired by the author’s trips, Moriyama began to take photographs of accidental encounters, chaotic movements and momentary street scenes.
With this idea in mind, he starts to roam Japan by hitchhiking. He liked to travel with the drivers who were willing to take him any time of day and night and drive him along new highways stopping by abandoned cafes and giving him opportunity to photograph everything through a car window.
Three years later Moriyama understands that he can work like that himself without being an assistant to Hosoe.
Importantly, a photographer of lyrical, expressionist sensibility, Daido Moriyama has restlessly portrayed the emotional condition of everyday postwar Japan.
He belongs to the generation who matured in the decades following Japan’s surrender, who lived in urban centers and experienced the country’s submission to occupation and political pressures by its “liberators,” as well as its emergence as a vibrant economy. These and other factors stimulated a period of radical art-making in all spheres and Daido became a symbol of it.
In 1968 he creates a magazine Provoke and publishes his photographs in it. Although only three issues of the magazine were published, it was the starting point for a new era of Japanese counterculture.
The magazine went unnoticed for many people but young underground Japanese photographers both of that time and of the following decades studied photography based on the magazine. Moriyama published his shots exclusively in the format of magazines or photobooks.
He belongs to the generation who matured in the decades following Japan’s surrender, who lived in urban centers and experienced the country’s submission to occupation and political pressures by its “liberators,” as well as its emergence as a vibrant economy. These and other factors stimulated a period of radical art-making in all spheres and Daido became a symbol of it.
In 1968 he creates a magazine Provoke and publishes his photographs in it. Although only three issues of the magazine were published, it was the starting point for a new era of Japanese counterculture.
The magazine went unnoticed for many people but young underground Japanese photographers both of that time and of the following decades studied photography based on the magazine. Moriyama published his shots exclusively in the format of magazines or photobooks.
«Cities are galleries, museums, libraries, movies, and theaters. I perceive cities to be all of these things, and that's why I photograph them».
One of his books “Bye, Bye Photography, Dear!” published in 1972 becomes a manifesto of his vision of photography. Daido does not need perfectly polished images and pretentious conceptualism.
His photographs are fragments of life fragments, blurred with tilted horizon and perspective. All this anti-photography reflects in the best possible way the rapid course of human life, with all possible unities of opposites such as beauty and ugliness, tragedy and happiness.
Almost all of his famous black-and-white images were taken using simple compact camera without a viewfinder, Polaroid or Holga cameras, among other things, which is why his photographs are so grainy.
His photographs are fragments of life fragments, blurred with tilted horizon and perspective. All this anti-photography reflects in the best possible way the rapid course of human life, with all possible unities of opposites such as beauty and ugliness, tragedy and happiness.
Almost all of his famous black-and-white images were taken using simple compact camera without a viewfinder, Polaroid or Holga cameras, among other things, which is why his photographs are so grainy.
In 1971 Daido Moriyama makes a legendary photograph of a huge stray dog looking back straight into the camera. This stray dog later became a symbol of the photographer – they both wander around, act instinctively, glare at things constantly looking for something new. They are observers of the flow of life and outsiders in the world of norms and order. The symbolism of this photo also lies in the fact that this dog was found by Daido near an American air base on the island of Honshu.
Trying to remain apolitical, Moriyama endeavoured to show the rapidly changing (whether for bad or good) life in Japan through hypnotic and very personal photographs. Daido Moriyama can be called a dilettante in photography for an infinitely long time, but this is the kind of free art that the “newborn” Japan needed. This is the kind of art that is still highly valued today.
Trying to remain apolitical, Moriyama endeavoured to show the rapidly changing (whether for bad or good) life in Japan through hypnotic and very personal photographs. Daido Moriyama can be called a dilettante in photography for an infinitely long time, but this is the kind of free art that the “newborn” Japan needed. This is the kind of art that is still highly valued today.