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Daido Moriyama. Retrospective from 1965
The exhibition is being held in co-operation with the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville, and the Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo
5 September to 9 Dezember 2007
Raum 1 bis 3
(Köln, Mediapark)
Im Mediapark 7, 50670 Köln
This retrospective, which comprises some 500 photographs, presents the decidedly complex work of Daido Moriyama (b. 1938), one of the most renowned Japanese photographers, from 1965 to the present day. It consists of thirteen series of pictures, largely based on vintage material, and a film presentation.
Although Moriyama belongs to Japan’s post-1945 artist generation, who struck out along radically new aesthetic paths in the post-war period, it is interesting to note that to this day his work has lost none of its currency or artistic scope. In a compilation assembled by the artist himself, the following series of pictures are on display, each of which has its own resonance and its own speed: Pantomime (1965), Actor Shimizu Isamu (1967), NIPPON GEKIJO SHASHINCHO (Japan Theater Photo Album) (1968), Marine Accident (1969), Smash-Up (1969), Provoke No. 2 and No. 3 (1969), 71 N.Y. (1971), KARIUDO (Hunter) (1971), SHASHINYO SAYOUNARA (Farewell Photography) (1972), Light and Shadow, (1981/82), Daido Hysteric (1993) and Shinjuku (2000–04).
Daido Moriyama was born in Ikeda in the Japanese prefecture of Osaka in 1938. After training as a graphic designer and being stimulated to take an interest in the medium of photography by Takeji Iwamiya, he moved to Tokyo in 1961. He had planned to apply for a post with the VIVO agency based there, whose chief initiators included the photographers Shomei Tomatsu and Eikoh Hosoe. But as VIVO was at that time in the process of breaking up, Moriyama sought a different solution. He had the opportunity of working with Eikoh Hosoe, where he was primarily responsible for the publication of photographs. As he confirmed in one of his own articles, it is to Hosoe that he owed all the tools for his subsequent work. After three years, in 1964, he resigned his post with his great role model, and went freelance.
From then on he produced countless shots taken in the cities of Japan, which he combed on foot, or, à la Jack Kerouac, by car “on the road”, always with his hand-held camera. In rapid succession, the photographs bear witness to the virulent and unpredictable life of the streets, showing the contrasting mix of Asian-traditional and Western-modern, as well as a world of new media and liberal attitudes that was penetrating everyday life. The street-photographer Moriyama records all he encounters but pronounces no judgements; he looks into individual faces, sees geishas and street-girls, accompanies parades, notices architectural features and façades in seemingly random juxtaposition, peers into private niches or looks at film posters, slogans and advertising logos with their promises. While on the one hand the turbulence of civilization is reproduced, on the other Moriyama also wrests from this very turbulence, time and again in still-lifes and minute details as well as chiaroscuro depictions, calm, almost meditative moments. Thus he exploits the medium of photography as a pure “light-pencil” form of expression, or, in the case of the depiction of newspaper or sensation photos, as a means of reproduction – copies of reality, which for him attain the same degree of authenticity as all the other perceived impressions.
A quotation by Moriyama is illuminating in this context; on the occasion of a major exhibition at the Shimane Art Museum in Japan in 2003, he wrote: “A photograph is the result of a momentary thought, with the result that you are always experimenting and interpreting the streets and buildings of a city by using the reproduction equipment – the camera – in order to get beyond known languages and to develop another reality running counter to the incessant flow of time. If this is achieved, the image captured in the photograph transcends the limited imagination or the ego of the photographer and becomes a symbol that signifies a world and includes the memory of time.”
In NIPPON GEKIJO SHASHINCHO (Japan Theater Photo Album) – a series that was first published in 1968 – the photographer was also to collect those images that came about not least under the influence of the poet and theatrical director Shuji Terayama. Terayama had re-introduced street theatre to Japan, and worked with unusual characters in his plays, characters who also play lead roles in Moriyama’s photographs: eccentrics, dwarfs and transvestites. But Moriyama saw himself not so much as a chronicler of this theatrical activity; for him, rather, it was important to see how all this was related to everyday life, which could come up with no less tense and adventurous situations as the theatre.
In this context we might also mention the series titled Pantomime, which he shot in the mid 1960s in hospitals and which depicts prepared human foetuses. With these shots, he points explicitly to the drama of life, which was here cut short in its development only to function as an illustrative model for a phase, which, at first based on purely sensory reception, holds open the possibility of many and varied developments. These photographs can be interpreted as pointing the way for Moriyama, namely as symbols of an intuitive, reproductive, multilaterally developing œuvre capable of making generally valid statements about a magically perceived world.
If the imagery of Moriyama’s photographs is brusque, contrasty, out-of-focus and grainy, this is due on the one hand to his rapid style of shooting, often while he himself is moving, in which he often does not even look through the viewfinder, and on the other to his intensive work in the darkroom, during which he experiences the motifs once more and seeks to condense them. The shot of the Misawa “Stray Dog” (1971) is as it were a symbol, chosen by Moriyama himself, of his own œuvre: border-crossing, uncommitted, instinctive and highly attentive to atmosphere and detail. The act of taking a photograph as of post-processing can certainly be described as an existential necessity for Moriyama, to which he yields expansively and uncompromisingly.
We should not forget Moriyama’s early fascination with the works of the American photographers William Klein, Robert Frank and Weegee. In particular Klein’s book New York, first published in Japan in 1957, attracted the particular interest of the young Japanese photographer. In 1971, on a trip to New York. Moriyama was to go on to compose an image of the city that was both his own and yet related. Likewise of great importance was the Pop artist Andy Warhol, and here in particular his silk-screen prints for the Car Crashes (1963), which are directly adopted in Moriyama’s own 1969 series on the theme, titled Smash-Up. Another series, likewise influenced by Warhol, deals with the overcrowded yet stimulating world of commodities, with Coca-Cola and V 8 juice, was published in the influential and revolutionary photo-magazine Provoke (among whose founders was Moriyama’s friend Takuma Nakahira), which provided a striking forum for a confrontation with new aesthetic possibilities.
With the closely juxtaposed large-format photographs in the series Shinjuku, which is devoted to the downtown Tokyo district of that name, and also the series Daido Hysteric, a montage of many smaller views put together to form one large panel, both of which came about in collaboration with the avant-garde fashion label “Hysteric Glamour”, Moriyama draws the beholder once more into a kaleidoscopic and unencompassable world of big-city life. The individual here seems abandoned to a sea of impressions, while only Moriyama’s camera captures the most laconic facets: machine parts, a tree in front of a multi-storey car-park, high-tension cables, lilies, shop-window decorations, air-conditioning equipment on façades, beer bottles, an old glove in a fence, a scrawny stray cat, and time and again people, hurrying past or waiting, or a cyclist silhouetted against the enormous skyline of the city, which at the edges merges into simple houses and huts.
Moriyama’s exhibition activity, which he regards as a decisive component of his artistic process, is particularly lively in his home country; but since his work was given pride of place in 1974 at the group exhibition New Japanese Photography staged at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, he has also been highly regarded in America particularly. In 1999, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art organized a solo exhibition, which then came to Europe with great success, being shown at the Museum Folkwang in Essen and the Fotomuseum Winterthur (1999/2000). Further major exhibitions were held at the White Cube in London in 2002 and the Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain in Paris in 2003.
This exhibition in Cologne has been staged in close collaboration with the artist and the Taka Ishii Gallery in Tokyo. Already last year, the project, in a compressed form, was highly acclaimed when presented at the FOAM museum of photography in Amsterdam, and, enlarged, it went on to visit the Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo in Seville, an exhibition which forms the basis for the current show.
There is a varied programme of events to accompany this Daido Moriyama retrospective. Alongside public guided tours on every second Sunday at 3 p.m., the Japanese Cultural Institute in Cologne is presenting highlights of Japanese film history in September and October, which give an insight into Moriyama’s life and work and cast light on the historical background of his œuvre. Prof. Minoru Shimizu, art historian in Kyoto, will give a lecture on Daido Moriyama (6 September, 7 p.m., in the exhibition), as will Ferdinand Brüggemann, photo-historian in Cologne (23 October, 7 p.m., likewise in the exhibition).
We should like to draw your attention to the new children’s tours of the Photographische Sammlung, which are taking place in the exhibition from 3 to 4.30 p.m. on Saturdays 22 September, 20 October and 17 November.
Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, Im Mediapark 7, 50670 Cologne, Tel.: 0049 221/2265900, Fax: 0049 221/2265901, photographie@sk-kultur.de, www.photographie-sk-kultur.de
Links zum Thema:
Daido Moriyama
Japanisches Kulturinstitut Köln
Taka Ishii Gallery
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