Daido Moriyama @ The Photographers’ Gallery
6th October 2023 – 11th February 2024
A Retrospective
It’s the first time that the Photographers’ gallery has devoted all four floors of its exhibition spaces to one photographer. The fact that the photographer is Daido Moriyama is no surprise, in fact what is more surprising and perhaps says more about our cultural institutions (don’t get me started), is that after 60 years as an internationally recognised photographer, this is his first major retrospective in the UK.
Lazily labelled a ‘street photographer’, Moriyama’s work is much more, interrogating as it does the very nature of photography, its purpose and our relationship to it.
Starting in the early 60’s when Japan had only recently been released from US occupation post WW2, Moriyama was able to capture a society undergoing a fundamental cultural change in all its chaotic form. A new era demanded a new photographic language and although initially ridiculed by critics at the time, his “are, bure, boke” (“grainy, blurry, out-of-focus”) visual became his signature style.
What the Photographers’ gallery has succeeded in doing is capturing the chaos, the sensory overload and the essence of a society dealing with trauma and change. Whole walls plastered in photographic images are disorientating and claustrophobic, but also exhilarating and leaves the viewer in no doubt that they are surrounded by the work of a master photographer.
What follows are some of the highlights.
‘Farewell Photography’ (1972)
What is a photograph? What governs
our choices? What is reality? This collection of photographs was Moriyama’s language of rejection. A rejection of the artificiality of photography in magazines, newspapers, billboards etc. What we are presented with are scraps of negatives found on the darkroom floor complete with dust and scratches, images that were often out of focus, over exposed, fragmented and lacking a common theme.
‘Farewell Photography,’ as the name suggested, was a destruction of what photography had become.
‘Farewell Photography’
‘Farewell Photography’
‘Farewell Photography’
‘Farewell Photography’
‘Accidents: Premeditated or Not’ (1969)
This series of photographs although focussing on accidents, was not about death per se, but about its media impact. How was life and trauma depicted in news outlets and magazines at a time when Japan was becoming increasingly Westernised. Moriyama photographed and re-photographed images and photocopies of images that appeared on TV and in magazines, thereby reinforcing the distance between the image and the event itself. As Moriyama observed, television and radio sought out the facts but rarely witnessed the events.
‘Accidents: Premeditated or Not’
‘Accidents: Premeditated or Not’
The exhibition is remarkable in that it offers viewers a different insight into what photography can be. With our visual and image based cultures depicting artificial realities, Moriyama shows that grainy, blurred and out of focus images can often be a truer depiction of what we are and have become.