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

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.