A new tome composes four key early publications by the great Japanese photographer, tracing the evolution of his unique and radical vision
Daido Moriyama is the kind of friend who talks to you without making eye contact, according to artist Tadanori Yokoo. The Japanese photographer, who turns 87 this year, is world-famous for his blurry, off-kilter images, seemingly shot not through the viewfinder but from the hip. His radical style is emblematic of the generation of Japanese photographers who wanted to free photography from its constraints in the wake of the war and translate the shockwaves that were running through Japan. A new tome by Thames & Hudson entitled Quartet presents four early titles by Moriyama in the structure of a musical composition. “Not only did these books form the foundation of his subsequent career, but they represent the formation of a visual language that was uniquely his own,” editor Mark Holborn tells Dazed.
Shortly after moving to Tokyo in 1961, Moriyama threw himself into the city’s vibrant avant-garde scene. He assisted photographer Eikoh Hosoe, befriended Takuma Nakahira (with whom he would later join forces to create the influential photography magazine Provoke) and tailed underground theatre troupes under the direction of playwright Shuji Terayama. Representing a tradition that was vanishing from the new, post-war Japan, these theatres became the basis of Moriyama’s acclaimed first book, Japan, A Photo Theater (1968). Mixing experimental performance, popular entertainment and scenes from everyday life, it revealed Moriyama’s bent for the theatrical, be it on the stage or in the streets. “That book was steeped in the theatricality that lies at the heart of so many aspects of Japanese culture,” says Holborn. “It highlighted the sense of both the stage and the backstage, with Moriyama closing it with imagery of specimens from a gynaecological hospital. The fringe theatres were merely a manifestation of a wider sense of human drama.”
Where Moriyama’s first book was printed in gravure, which is now an almost obsolete printing medium, on uncoated paper, Quartet is printed on varnished, semi-gloss stock, with intense blacks and amped-up contrast. “We live in a different era to that of the original book,” says Holborn. “The production of Quartet is loud in every way. There is nothing soft or gentle about it. Of course, there is room for another way of printing Moriyama that should be full of subtlety and lyricism, but that is another enterprise.” Holborn’s hardback comes in an electric green slipcase, which somehow heightens the impression of dizzying darkroom fumes.
