First: the easy bit. Daido Moriyama, born 1938, is an internationally famous Japanese photographer, best-known for his gritty black & white street photography and contributions to various avant-garde and experimental publications in Japan’s post-war period. The Photographers’ Gallery, one of London’s most prestigious photographic centres, is hosting the first UK retrospective of Moriyama’s work, starting on 6 October.
That was easy enough, but trying to define the work of Daido Moriyama, or the essence of what makes him so special and influential, is much harder. Like the masks in Noh theatre, Moriyama has taken on various enigmatic identities over his six-decade career.
The young man from Osaka who endures living in Tokyo flop houses to learn from the experimental photographer Eikoh Hosoe, but doesn’t take a single picture of his own for three years; the cultural bomb-chucker, railing against Western-style photojournalism and bringing out a book (Farewell, Photography) that includes lots of ‘spoiled’ images and shots of analogue photography detritus; the Japanese Jack Kerouac, buggering off around the country in an old Toyota; the artist who talks about ‘desire’ and the erotic pull of photography while also comparing himself to a loner, a stray dog; the grand old man of Japanese photography, happy to share tips and advice in a banal-sounding (but wonderful) 2019 book called How I Take Photographs.
Moriyama: a new understanding
What I find fascinating about Moriyama is that his work can influence and inspire on many different levels. Forget geisha and Mt Fuji, a lot of Western photographers now come back from Japan trips with gritty, monochrome, clearly Moriyama-esque images of dive bars and back streets; at the same time, his work is like catnip to photography academics and historians, who wear out their keyboards pondering its cultural significance.
So, not an easy photographer
