Daido Moriyama is currently exhibited at Foam (Fotografiemuseum Amsterdam, until August 23).
Those who are a little bit into Japanese photography will know his work. Daido Moriyama is one of the most important photographers of the 20th century and IMHO his book “Farwell Photography” (1972) is more radical than any western photography book of the beginning 1970s. At the moment I am waiting for a new reprint of “Farwell Photography” and I will write more about it after it has arrived from Japan.
Today is the last day of the exhibition Moriyama • Shinjuku • Araki at Tokyo City Opera Art Gallery. I wanted to write about it much earlier and I contacted the gallery for some more images and information since the website on the exhibition is still not finished yet. Unfortunately I haven’t received an answer and now I am a little bit late.
Anyway the information is not completely outdated since there is an accompanying book published, available at Amazon.jp.
Exhibition and book concentrate on one prominent place in Japan: Shinjuku, an entertainment, business and shopping area in Tokyo with the largest red light district, Kabukicho, in Japan. Both artists photographed in this district from the 1960s until today.
I don’t know if Daido Moriyama and Nobuyoshi Araki ever worked together before this exhibition, but this is surprisingly the first show focussing on the two masters and they produced for the exhibition a series in Shinjuku last August. In total the exhibition features around 900! photographs, half of them not published yet. While Araki exhibits a mix of b/w and colour photographs Moriyama shows as usual his b/w photographs. Moriyama’s colour photography has not made it into museums yet, but it was already exhibited and published for the first time outside Japan in 2004.
Araki and Moriyama met very early in their careers at the end 1960s when Araki wanted to join the “Provoke” group (Takuma Nakahira, Daido Moriyama, Yutaka Takanashi, Koji Taki, e.g.), but was rejected, because he worked as a commercial photographer at that time. In 1974 Moriyama and Araki taught together at the private photographic workshop/school founded by Shomei Tomatsu. The other teachers were Eikoh Hosoe, Akihasa Fukase and Noriaki Yokosuka. Latest at the beginning of the 1990s Araki became Japans most famous photographer, notably when his international career took off with the “Akt-Tokyo” travel exhibition produced by Camera Austria, Graz/ Austria. Even Moriyama’s photography was/is highly influencial in Japan his international career just began a few years ago when in 1999 the SFMOMA held the first Moriyama (travel) exhibition outside Japan and then in Europe with an one man show at Fondation Cartier, Paris.
Note: It is not unusual that the final break through of a Japanese artist *in Japan* happens after he became a star internationally.
I forgot this in my last post on Daido Moriyama:
Daido Moriyma received the Cultural Award of the German Photographic Society (DGPh) in Cologne on November 1. The award is the most important photography award in Germany and is presented every year.
The award winners include internationally renowned scientists, inventors, writers, publishers, editors, lecturers, art directors and, in particular, top photographers from Germany and abroad. Previous photographers who received the price are (to name a few): August Sander, Man Ray, Henri Cartier-Bresson, William Klein, Peter Keetman, David Hockney and Wim Wenders.
I had the pleasure to deliver the Keynote address on the artist. :-)
“Farwell Photography” by Daido Moriyama (Shashin yo Sayonara, 1972) is one of a dozen Japanese photography books (others are from Eikoh Hosoe, Jun Morinaga and Ikko Nakahara) being included in the upcoming auction “Photographic Literature” at Swann in New York, Dec. 7. The estimate for the book is 4.500 – 5.500 US$! This is above the price range I have seen in France recently. Even this book belongs undoubtly to the important photography books of the 20s century – more on Japanese photobooks and their current appraisal in a future post – I wonder what makes this book the second most expensive book in the auction behind a book by Robert Frank. We will see if the auction will confirm the high estimate…
Speaking of prices, during the extremely successful auction “Veronica’s Revenge” two weeks ago at Phillips, de Pury & Company, New York a “Seascape” by Hiroshi Sugimoto reached 27.600 US$ (estimate 10.000 – 15.000 US$).
Phillips, de Pury & Company New York, Veronica’s Revenge (Session 2), 11/9/2004
