With my friends we run a music club once a week where we meet and listen to music, each of us can choose a piece and sometimes describe it, if the others don't know it. The last time I went to my friends' house, which I love doing because it's like going back to England in the 1950's, you step inside and it's a time warp, everything literally is from the 1950's, and we spend time listening to wonderful music.
I look at their couch in wonder, I can't believe this 1950's style type of couch still exists, it is so comfortable, just perfect for listening to music.
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| Photo by Daido Moriyama courtesy of Pinterest |
Anyway after I viewed the installation of photographs by Carrie Mae Weems at Tate Modern, I decided to go up to level 4 and look at Daido Moriyama's photographs. I was curious about his work, his obsessiveness in taking photographs and leaving them undeveloped for 30 years.
Moriyama (born in 1938), the master of street photography, worked for the photographic journal Provoke by invitation of Takuma Nakahiri, who in 1968 asked him to join in the second issue see pic below.
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| Photo by Daido Moriyama courtesy of Pinterest |
Moriyama took photographs of a couple having sex in a hotel. This was in contravention of traditional Japanese culture. He loved photographing his area in Tokyo called: Shinjyuku. He has always been a voyeuristic street photographer, wandering around, pointing and shooting with his camera. His style called: Bure(=Shake) and Boke(=No focus). He made the images blurry, unfocused, grainy, shot in rapid succession, then seeing how they developed in the darkroom.
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| Photo by Daido Moriyama courtesy of Pinterest |
He was inspired by Jack Kerouac's On the Road and the fact that he wrote on a continuous roll of paper, no interruptions. In Moriyama's case continuously taking photographs of the ordinary, taking in the city landscape, his impressions of the city, chance encounters, moods but also the grittiness of the ordinary, without trying to prettify them. With this approach he still produced striking images. His close ups make you slow down as a viewer, they force you to look in at the everyday that could be your everyday, he shows imperfect human beings up close: a woman opening her eye wide see pic below, a boy's shaved head; they could all be you the viewer, you tend to identify with them as they are depicted in a natural, ordinary way. He also takes photos of discarded, ugly objects, that you might not have noticed. The photographs are all in sequence, closely put together like a menu of images that create a view of a city they are melancholic images of the ordinary.
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| Photo by Daido Moriyama courtesy of Pinterest |
It should be understood that this technique of documentating the everyday life in an urban environment, for example showing a photo of a urinal covered in tape, was a departure from the norms in Japan. It can be linked to the mass observation movement originating in the UK in 1937. Mass observation aimed to record everyday life in Britain, using large numbers of untrained volunteer observers. The photos in the exhibition are monochrome; by using black and white instead of colour he avoids distractions and he is able to focus for example more on detail close ups such as facial expressions.
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| Photo by Daido Moriyama courtesy of Pinterest |
Moriyama published the book Farewell Photography, orginally titled Bye Bye Photography Dear, in 1972. He was deconstructing photography, a process which he started with the photobook Hunter published in the same year. The entire collection of images was exhibited for the first time at the Paris Photo 2015. The images were out of focus, randomly challenging Western precise photography at the time. Moriyama describes it with these words: 'The authority of the failed negative, with its inherent possibility, could be restored. I imagined I could construct a book - a book of pure sensations without meaning, by shuffling into a harmonious whole, a series of childish images'. Basically he is saying that all photographs are equally valid.
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| Photo by Daido Moriyama courtesy of Pinterest |
The book had a punk quality about it, distinguishing it from the photographic medium of its time. It was a forerunner of images that would be used in the 1980's & 1990's, for example by Ray Gun Magazine, an American alternative rock and roll magazine founded by art director David Carson which used an experimental typography and abstract chaotic design. The first issue in November 1992 had on its cover Henry Rollins.
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| Photo of Ray Gun Magazine courtesy of Pinterest |
Moriyama also published Memories of a Dog, which was part of Asahi Camera, in 1983. This contains a famous photograph, a close up of a stray dog looking at the camera photographed in Misawa City in 1971. The way the dog is turned towards tha camera with his shoulders down, with a tired, beaten, almost human expression, provides an image that is at once beautiful and wretched, see pic below. The grainy monochromatic quality of the photograph produces poetry.
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| Photo by Daido Moriyama courtesy of Pinterest |
Moriyama said 'some days our howl is that life is wretched, some days life is wonderful'. It was a chance encounter he saw the dog as soon as he stepped out of the hotel where he was staying. You become completely absorbed by his photographs. The book is brilliant, showcasing his travels, it's an autobiographical account, the bars, the coffee shops he has visited, his school, it's about memory, it's nostalgic. He juxtaposes different images together. It was interesting to see ordinary life in Tokyo by a Master, I love his monochromatic photographs.
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