DAIDO VERS PDF ANG - Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain ...

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PRESS RELEASE EXHIBITION OCTOBER 31, 2003 — JANUARY 11, 2004 PRESS OPENING ON THURSDAY, OCTOBER 30, 2003 AT 3:00 PM DAIDO MORIYAMA IS CONSIDERED ONE OF THE LEADING FIGURES OF JAPANESE PHOTOGRAPHY TODAY. BORN OUTSIDE OF OSAKA IN 1938, HE WITNESSED THE DRAMATIC CHANGES THAT SWEPT OVER JAPAN IN THE DECADES FOLLOWING WORLD WAR II. THE VISUAL AND EXISTENTIAL TURMOIL BROUGHT ON BY THIS TRANSFORMATION WAS TO BECOME THE ONE OF THE CORE SUBJECTS OF MORIYAMA’S WORK. HIS GRITTY PHOTOGRAPHS OF JAPANESE STREETS AND HIGHWAYS EXPRESS THE CONFLICTING REALITIES OF MODERN JAPAN: THE UNEXPECTED SURVIVAL OF AGE-OLD TRADITION WITHIN CONTEMPORARY PRACTICE, THE PARADOX OF A CULTURE DISTURBED YET FASCINATED BY THE UNDERGOING CHANGES. Although Daido Moriyama has enjoyed important retrospectives in the United States and Japan, there have been few opportunities to view his work in Europe. The Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain brings together for the first time in France more than 200 photographs dating from the 60s to the present. Organized in direct collaboration with the artist, the exhibition will include many of the artist’s most significant series of images such as Platform (1977), Light and Shadow (1981-82), Hysteric (1992), Polaroid Polaroid (1997) and Shinjuku (2002). After training as a graphic designer, Moriyama began work as a free-lance industrial designer in 1958. In the course of his work, he visited the photo studios of Takeji Iwamiya and became so fascinated with the world of photography that he decided to give up design and serve as an apprentice in the studio. In 1961, he moved to Tokyo hoping to work for the VIVO Agency, a radical collective of contemporary photojournalists. Although he arrived just after it was decided to disband the group, he was still able to get a job working as the assistant of one of its members Eikoh Hosoe, the first internationally recognized photographer of his generation in Japan. Moriyama found himself to be most pro- foundly influenced by VIVO photographers Shomei Tomatsu and Eikoh Hosoe. Like Tomatsu, Moriyama was fascinated by the bizarre underworld of Japanese street life and trough his collaboration with Hosoe, he drew a sense of the theatrical and the erotic. Osaka, 1996 (series Hysteric n° 8) Courtesy Daido Moriyama and Taka Ishii Gallery Moriyama’s vision was also enriched by his acquaintance with the work of two American photographers: William Klein and Robert Frank. These photographers did not hesitate to move in close to their subjects, using their small hand-held cameras like guns made to shoot on any number of moving targets. Like them, Moriyama practiced a new, more action-oriented street photography. Often out of focus, vertiginously tilted, or invasively cropped, Moriyama’s images convey a sense of the disordered human condition. These diverse influences came together in Moriyama’s first projects as a freelance photographer. In 1965, inspired by Shomei Tomatsu’s photographs on the American occupation of Japan, he set out to photograph the streets of Yokosuka, an important cold-war base for the American military. Fascinated by the novelty and crude venality of the military base, he photographed girls lingering outside the bars, mixed couples, American souvenir shops, billboards and neon signs. At about the same time, Moriyama began working with avant-garde poet and dramatist Shuji Terayama. Influenced by the work of Antonin Artaud as well as by the Dada and Surrealist movements, Terayama was committed to reenergizing theatre by taking it back into the streets and included dwarfs, giants, and marginal characters of all descriptions in his spectacles. Pictures of this theatre group figure prominently in Moriyama’s first publication, Japan: A Photo Theater (1968), a compilation
Shinjuku, Tokyo, 2001 (series Shinjuku) Courtesy Daido Moriyama and Taka Ishii Gallery of photographs that reflect the disjunctive nature of contemporary urban experience. In this book, photographs of the eccentric characters of Terayama’s stage (a hairy-chested man dressed up as a geisha) are juxtaposed with strange and extraordinary images of daily life (a happy Japanese gathering of Lion’s Club members in their ritual American costumes). As Moriyama stated: “My underlying thought was to show how in the most common and everyday, in the world of most normal people, in their most normal existence, there is something dramatic, remarkable, fictional. This kind of chaotic everyday existence is what I think Japan is all about.” Moriyama was fascinated by the strange, the unusual, the extraordinary. As a result of this interest, he began to identify himself with those living outside of social norms. A great admirer of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, Moriyama developed a photographic style that reflected the outsider’s point of view like the authors rambling voice in the novel. He began to shoot pictures whenever the mood struck him, while running or riding in a moving car. Grainy, blurred and askew, the resultant images suggest that they were made in haste, as in a secret gesture. Rather than carefully selecting and framing his images, he shoots freely without looking through the viewfinder, using his body more than his eyes. Describing his photographic method, Moriyama has stated: “I turn to the right and photograph a poster, then, I turn around and photograph the street. Sometimes I even turn the camera on myself. I do so without discrimination and without any internal contradiction.” Moriyama’s Accidents series, published in Aishi Camera in 1969, expands upon Warhol’s own series of the same name. In this series, Moriyama appropriated images taken from television screens, news- papers and police safety posters. Like Warhol, Moriyama acknowledges a world in which everything has become a representation. Ultimately, the originality of Moriyama’s photographs lies in their ambiguous relationship to reality. Throughout his career, Moriyama constantly wrestled with the quandary of expression in a presumably transparent medium and ultimately concluded that photography is unable to convey a fixed meaning. His book, entitled Farewell Photography, published in 1972, expresses this dilemma. Bleached, scratched, dirtied by dust, its pictures are pushed to a point of illegibility in an attempt to photograph the void itself. There are images of nothingness: a closeup of a dirty street, a blank wall, a reflection in a blank television screen. This book questions the very nature of representation, expressing a nihilistic doubt in our capacity to ever fully grasp reality through its photographic representation. The artist suggests that there is no one natural reality available to express our beliefs and sensations. For Moriyama, perhaps the only true reality to be found is in the act of photography itself. Stray Dog, Misawa, Aomori, 1971 Daiwa Radiator Factory Collection Cover page: High Heel, Nakano, Tokyo, 1985 and Rose, Shibuya, Tokyo, 1984 (diptych, series Lettre à Saint-Lou) Courtesy Daido Moriyama and Taka Ishii Gallery A catalogue (160 pages, bilingual English/French) will be published on the occasion of the Daido Moriyama exhibition. Press information Linda Chenit assisted by Nathalie Desvaux tel. 33 (0)1 42 18 56 77/65 fax 33 (0)1 42 18 56 52 email lchenit@fondation.cartier.fr online images/fondation.cartier.fr 261, boulevard Raspail 75014 Paris tél. 33 (0)1 42 18 56 50 fax 33 (0)1 42 18 56 52 fondation.cartier.fr The Daido Moriyama exhibition is organized with the support of the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain under the aegis of the Fondation de France, and with the sponsorship of Cartier.
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