Entrance to the retrospective at Foto Arsenal Vienna. Left: *Stray Dog, Misawa* (1971); right: the first grid wall with images from *Japan: A Photo Theater*.
It must have been four or five years ago, in a black-and-white street photography workshop in Venice. Brian Lloyd Duckett, our instructor — a quiet and very good photographer — asked us at some point who our reference points were. I came with my old classics. Above all David "Chim" Seymour, who still keeps me company through the five Lagoon photographs on the wall of our Venice apartment. Others named Saul Leiter — almost a default choice in street photography courses. And then a name came up that I didn't have in my ear: Daido Moriyama.
That evening I googled, then ordered books, read my way in, and several times considered buying one or two of the small Polaroid one-offs he regularly releases through Akio Nagasawa. To this day I haven't. But Moriyama stayed, and he stayed vehemently.
Now, after years, finally a major retrospective. Foto Arsenal Vienna is showing, through mid-May, one of the most comprehensive Moriyama exhibitions ever to tour — the seventh stop after São Paulo, Berlin, London, Lausanne, Reggio Emilia, and Helsinki, curated by the Instituto Moreira Salles in collaboration with the Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation.
Four quotations from the wall texts caught and held me. I'll use them as a scaffold to work my way through a sixty-year body of work, without marching through it chronologically.
In 1968, the critic Kōji Taki, the poet Takahiko Okada, and the photographers Takuma Nakahira and Yutaka Takanashi founded the independent magazine Provoke in Tokyo. Subtitle: Provocative Materials for Thought. Moriyama joined from the second issue onward. The group was reading Marx, Freud, Sartre, intent on freeing photography from its bourgeois role — away from the humanist photojournalism that tried to explain the world through clear, sharp, well-composed images.
The editorial of Provoke 1 is programmatic. "Images in themselves are not thought," it declares. And further: "What we photographers can do, and should do, is capture with our own eyes those fragments of reality that are completely impossible to capture with existing words, and continue actively to create materials that challenge those words and thoughts."
This is a declaration of war in several directions at once. Against the Magnum school with its "decisive moment," against the humanist universalism of The Family of Man, against the engaged documentary practice of the Japanese left, which used images as evidence in a political argument. Moriyama and his comrades are saying: all of this is still language. Even political photography believes it can translate the world into words. We produce material that resists that translation.
From this emerges what photography history will later label are, bure, boke — grainy, blurred, out of focus. The style is not the result of technical carelessness but a deliberate production in the darkroom. Grain is amplified, contrast is pushed, blur is allowed. Not because sharpness isn't possible, but because it lies. Everyday perception is not clear. It is confused, overlapping, uncertain. And precisely this confusion is what the image should not smooth over but bring to the surface.
For Provoke 2, Moriyama contributed a series called Eros — photographs of a woman that grow more seductive page by page while simultaneously dissolving into grain. Desire intensifies, and the image weakens. This is Moriyama's thesis about the media of his time: the more we consume images, the less remains of the object. In the same issue, Okada writes of "the excessive ripening of capitalist society, like rotting, ripe fruit, which causes sexual phenomena and sexual images to spread." What consumer capitalism represses spills out as a flood of images.
Anyone standing in front of these photographs today should pause to remember how radical this was in 1969. Baudrillard's writings on simulation and hyperreality come ten to fifteen years later. Moriyama and his collaborators had already formulated it all — photographically, not theoretically.
Then it tips. In 1972, Shashin yo Sayonara — Farewell Photography — appears. The title is meant literally. Moriyama is not saying goodbye to individual images but to photography as institution, as bearer of meaning, as craft. The book gathers discarded exposures, negatives, strips of film, photographs of television screens, scratched images, solarized images, cropped images. The idea of photography as a window onto the world is rejected. What remains is the two-dimensional surface itself — grain, blackness, image decay.
*Farewell Photography* (1972). The Vienna exhibition shows the book's complete layout as wallpaper, with six framed prints in front — the images later singled out for the museum.
The curators of the Vienna exhibition found an unusual solution for this room. The wallpaper shows the book's complete layout, spread by spread, hundreds of images as a flat grid. In front of it hang six framed prints — the pictures later singled out for the museum. You see both at once: the book as surface noise, and the subsequent extraction of specific images. It's hard to imagine a better curatorial argument about Farewell Photography. The book refuses to be reduced to individual pictures, even though the market and the museums have done exactly that.