PHOTO PREVIEW:Daido Moriyama-Daido Tokyo
Daido Moriyama one of Japan’s leading figures, is still a relentless force in the photography world, and a constant source of inspiration for new photographers. Witness of the dramatic 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 Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain Archive
Daido Moriyama’s exhibition at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain focuses on his recent work. Featuring a large selection of color photographs, “Daido Tokyo” will shed light on this lesser-known yet ubiquitous aspect of his photographic practice over the last two decades. The Fondation Cartier has also commissioned a new work from Daido Moriyama in conjunction with the exhibition. Out of focus, vertiginously tilted or invasively cropped, Moriyama’s images reflect the disjunctive nature of contemporary urban experience. This style of B&W photography would characterize the photographs of his first publications, “Japan: A Photo Theater” and “Farewell Photography” and establish his reputation as a photographer of international importance. For Moriyama, B&W images are associated with the realm of the symbolic, while color speaks explicitly of reality, of the world and the people around him when he is out on the streets of Tokyo. Products of direct confrontations with the urban environment, the photographs of Daido Moriyama present a vision of the world caught between reality and subjective experience. The exhibition is divided in two main themes. “Images of Tokyo”. Daido Moriyama’s work has frequently focused on the city of Tokyo, in particular on his own neighborhood in the Shinjuku district. Defamiliarizing items from everyday life, he photographs faded posters, reflections in shop windows, odd-shaped pipes, the faces of people passing in the street. Rather than carefully selecting and framing his images, he shoots freely without looking through the viewfinder, using his body more than his eyes to capture reality. Blurred and askew, the resultant photographs are characterized by a “snapshot aesthetic” favored by the artist. Breaking with the convention of the carefully composed image, Daido Moriyama invents a powerful and remarkably expressive visual language that conveys the sense of a disordered urban reality. “Color”: In the 1970s, Daido Moriyama began experimenting with color photography, an interest that grew with the arrival of the digital camera. By the early 2000s, he was mainly shooting in color, and then converting the photographs to black-and-white. From 2008 to 2015, he produced thousands of digital images, some of which he chose to keep in color. A large number of these works are featured in the exhibition at the Fondation Cartier. In his photographs, color is not opposed to black-and-white; the two are instead complementary. Commissioned specifically for the exhibition, “Dog and Mesh Tights” explores the obscure and unremarked corners of the urban environment. Between July ‘14 and March ‘15, Moriyama captured subjects he encountered on the streets, such as exterior walls of buildings, or in deserted back alleys during his urban wanderings. Made up of images from each of the cities he visited during that period: Tokyo, Hong Kong, Taipei, Arles, Houston and Los Angeles, the resulting “photographic map” of the world resembles an unfinished jigsaw puzzle, conveying “the confusing interaction of people and things” in the urban environment.
Info: Curators: Hervé Chandès & Alexis Fabry, Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, 261, Boulevard Raspail, Paris, Duration: 6/2-5/6/16, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed & Fri-Sun 11:00-20:00, Thu 11:00-22:00, http://fondation.cartier.com
