Daido Moriyama: Quartet13 Images
Daido Moriyama is the kind of friend who talks to you without making eye contact, according to artist Tadanori Yokoo. The Japanese photographer, who turns 87 this year, is world-famous for his blurry, off-kilter images, seemingly shot not through the viewfinder but from the hip. His radical style is emblematic of the generation of Japanese photographers who wanted to free photography from its constraints in the wake of the war and translate the shockwaves that were running through Japan. A new tome by Thames & Hudson entitled Quartet presents four early titles by Moriyama in the structure of a musical composition. “Not only did these books form the foundation of his subsequent career, but they represent the formation of a visual language that was uniquely his own,” editor Mark Holborn tells Dazed.
Shortly after moving to Tokyo in 1961, Moriyama threw himself into the city’s vibrant avant-garde scene. He assisted photographer Eikoh Hosoe, befriended Takuma Nakahira (with whom he would later join forces to create the influential photography magazine Provoke) and tailed underground theatre troupes under the direction of playwright Shuji Terayama. Representing a tradition that was vanishing from the new, post-war Japan, these theatres became the basis of Moriyama’s acclaimed first book, Japan, A Photo Theater (1968). Mixing experimental performance, popular entertainment and scenes from everyday life, it revealed Moriyama’s bent for the theatrical, be it on the stage or in the streets. “That book was steeped in the theatricality that lies at the heart of so many aspects of Japanese culture,” says Holborn. “It highlighted the sense of both the stage and the backstage, with Moriyama closing it with imagery of specimens from a gynaecological hospital. The fringe theatres were merely a manifestation of a wider sense of human drama.”
Daido Moriyama, A Photo Theater© Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation
Where Moriyama’s first book was printed in gravure, which is now an almost obsolete printing medium, on uncoated paper, Quartet is printed on varnished, semi-gloss stock, with intense blacks and amped-up contrast. “We live in a different era to that of the original book,” says Holborn. “The production of Quartet is loud in every way. There is nothing soft or gentle about it. Of course, there is room for another way of printing Moriyama that should be full of subtlety and lyricism, but that is another enterprise.” Holborn’s hardback comes in an electric green slipcase, which somehow heightens the impression of dizzying darkroom fumes.
Quartet also includes images from Farewell Photography (1972), which take us into the darker, more nihilistic parts of Moriyama’s imagination at a time when he was suffering from a drug dependency. They consist of found pictures from the darkroom floor, newspapers and magazines, all smudged, scratched and stomped on. There is also Moriyama’s stalker-like, Jack Kerouac-inspired A Hunter from the same year, as well as Light and Shadow (1982), which is, according to Holborn, akin to the experience of stumbling down a Shinjuku alleyway. “In the late 20th century, the exterior of the Japanese city was the epitome of chaos,” he says. “The city was almost like a slumbering monster who stirs in the night and occasionally growls. It was inevitable that Moriyama would photograph the street, and that he would do it as easily as going to a coffee shop or wandering to buy some cigarettes.”
Daido Moriyama, A Hunter© Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation
Holborn says the book wasn’t a “conventional editing task,” and resists its description as an anthology. “To me, an anthology is a collection of works without a sense of beginning and end,” he explains. “It is counter to the sense of narrative, and, for me, the sequence is almost paramount. Without narrative, the book remains dead. The challenge in Quartet was to create a sense of a whole. I view it as a single work in four separate movements.” Holborn’s musical analogy is not only structural, but also one befitting the photographer himself. “For all the graphic force of Moriyama’s language, for all the dynamics of contrast, for all his unsparing subject matter, he is an intensely lyrical artist. He is as poetic as a songwriter.”
Having first visited Tokyo in 1971, Holborn was in Japan when many of these photographs were made. In his essay contribution to the book, he draws a link between these images and his personal memory of Japan, contrasting Moriyama’s blur with the sharpness of novelist Yasunari Kawabata’s prose. “I have been looking at these pictures for decades,” Holborn elaborates. “They have, in a sense, shaped the way I view the exterior world. Moriyama touches a different source in my own memory bank. Going back to these pictures is an exercise in uncovering memory.”
And this might be why the experience of turning a book’s page accords with the experience of how we encounter and excavate our memories, as well as the sensation of how we might move through the haphazard geography of Tokyo’s backstreets. “You move through a book,” says Holborn. “You turn back and forth at will, just as you once turned down a certain street and looked at the criss-cross of the cables overhead and the dirt beneath your feet, unknowing of what lay ahead.”
Quartet by Daido Moriyama, edited by Mark Holborn, is published by Thames & Hudson, and out now.
