ART CITIES:Milan-Daido Moriyama

Daido Moriyama is one of Japan’s leading figures in photography. Witness to the spectacular changes that transformed post WWII Japan, his black and white photographs express a fascination with the cultural contradictions of age-old traditions that persist within modern society. Providing a harsh, crude vision of city life and the chaos of everyday existence, strange worlds, and unusual characters, his work occupies a unique space between the objective and the subjective, the illusory and the real.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Galleria Carla Sozzani Archive

Daido Moriyama’s use of a small hand held automatic camera gives his images a loose and casual aesthetic, undermined by a forceful and decisive point of view. In the ‘60s, Moriyama was part of a group of left-wing photographers who were critical of Japan’s post-war westernization or better yet. Americanization, in several of his images, Moriyama photographed rows packed with American products on the shelves of Tokyo’s supermarkets. What these photographers had in common was the use of a style that intentionally broke away from the style that was conventionally accepted at the time by the photographic intelligentsia, and was identified with the expression are, bure, boke (grainy, blurry and out of focus), in reference to the three main characteristics that distinguished the group’s images. In doing so, they translated their dissatisfaction or agitation with the rapid changes of Japanese society to a visual level. However, their protest was also exquisitely artistic, and questioned the conception of photography altogether. Refusing the idea that the photographic medium could only be used to produce archival documents, through a radicalization of style these photographers were putting an accent on its image-making capability. The exhibition “Daido Moriyama in Color” presents a body of over one hundred color images of the Japanese master of Photography. “The black and white tells about my inner world, my emotions and deep feelings that I feel every day walking through the streets of Tokyo or other cities, as a vagabond aimlessly. The color describes what I meet without any filters, and I like to record it for what it looks like to me. The first one is rich in contrasts, is harsh and fully reflects my solitary nature. The second one is polite, gentle, as I set myself towards the world”. In 1969, Moriyama publishes in the magazine Provoke “Eros” the visual tale of a night with a lover in a hotel room and a series of photos entirely shot in a drugstore at Aoyama while the youth protests raged outside. Today, fifty years later, Moriyama presents his color work at the Galleria Carla Sozzani. Daido Moriyama in Color includes a selection of 130 unpublished photographs made in the late ‘60s and early ‘80ss never seen before that are from the crucial years of Moriyama’s exploration. Charmed by the experiences of the Beat Generation and Jack Kerouac’s masterpiece “On The Road”, the thirty-year Moriyama created his own lonely and endless journey, through his images. These are photographs of a country that hangs in the balance between tradition and modernity from which Moriyama stole meaningful fragments of reality. By using the camera anarchically and taking pictures of unconventional subjects in a format dictated by Provoke magazine, his work demonstrated that what matters is “The experience of a moment”.

Info: Curator: Filippo Maggia, Galleria Carla Sozzani, corso Como 10,Milan, Duration: 8/11/15-10/1/16, Days & Hours: Sat-Tue 10:30-19:30, Wed-Thu 10:20-21:00, www.galleriacarlasozzani.org