Daido Moriyama
“Vintage and modern prints”
22 January – 12 March, 2005

In our retrospective of the Japanese artist, Daido Moriyama, born 1939 near Osaka, works from the past four decades are being shown. The exhibition is a follow-up to solo presentations at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris (2003), the White Cube in London (2002), the Fotomuseum Winterthur/Folkwang Museum, Essen (2000) and the MoMA, San Francisco (1999).
With series such as Japan: A Photo Theater, Farewell Photography and Hunter, as well as contributions to the legendary photo journal Provoke, Moriyama had, already in the 1970s, advanced to the status of one of the most important Japanese photographers. Influenced by Jack Kerouac’s literary work, the everyday aesthetics of Andy Warhol, the pictorial concept of the likes of Weegee and William Klein, Moriyama developed an unmistakable style. Aptly characterized as a “hunter of light”, he has photographed nudes, landscapes, billboards, street scenes, Coca-Cola cans and TV screens. From the start Moriyama has preferred working in daylight. There he seeks light-dark contrasts, diffuse gradations of gray tones that – even in close-ups – transpose the objects and, indeed, seem to dematerialize them.
A no less influential contemporary of Moriyama, namely Nobuyoshi Araki (whose work the gallery has shown in continual exhibits over ten years), has described in an interview what he felt when he first saw a Moriyama photo from the Eros series: “It totally blew me away […]. That photo of Moriyama’s seemed to represent exactly what I was thinking.” Despite their common opinion that the meaning of a photograph results from an association between Eros and Thanatos, the pictorial vocabulary of Moriyama and Araki differs formally. Moriyama’s preference for the atmospheric and the enigmatic, especially in his early work, testifies to a virtual abstraction of the motif. The unfocused and nuanced gray tones compose an “abstract concreteness” that denies the photograph any documentary or expositional character.
Tokyo is for Moriyama (as for Araki) a favorite “hunting ground”. The city, not as an urban phenomenon, but as a hopelessly entangled labyrinth represents an unrelenting challenge to the eye of the camera. The impenetrable zones of Shinjuku or Asakusa, their dark corners and magic locations with graduations from light to dark, are among his preferred districts (in 2002 a publication of Moriyama appeared with the title of Shinjuku).
Different from Araki who views the photographic shot itself as an erotic act, Moriyama’s mood remains sober. Not till he develops the negative does passion arise. The snapshot-like speed of the take is opposed by the long session in the darkroom. It is such exact postprocessing that furnishes never-identical prints from one and the same negative. They vary so much, e.g., in the now famous photo Stray Dog (1971) that Moriyama himself no longer knows exactly which was the original version.
The exhibition presents a fascinating collection of curiosities from small to large-scale black-and-white prints. Each photograph testifies to what it is that makes Moriyama into a “hunter of light”: “Envy, possessiveness, and jealousy, followed by violence, which is engendered by these emotions.”

Birgid Uccia

The exhibit has been organized in collaboration with Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo.