For Moriyama, this was the beginning of both a highly productive period and, by the mid-1970s, a time of personal instability. Moriyama’s work is best understood in the context of the deeply divided politics of the times, especially the protests surrounding the renewal of the U.S.–Japan Security Treaty in 1970, as well as the subsequent decline in political antagonism between the two countries and the rise in consumerism. In 1974 he produced a book of Xeroxed photographs of a 1971 visit to New York, calling it Another Country in New York, after another favorite author, James Baldwin. Experimenting boldly with cropping and pronounced grain, he also took pictures of pictures and reframed them, as in the Warholian series Accident (1969), a group of which are based on a traffic safety poster. ![]() Through an introduction from his friend Takuma Nakahira, Moriyama participated in the experimental magazine Provoke (1968–69), maintaining his apolitical stance within this highly political group. These photographs were published serially in Camera Mainichi beginning in 1968, but he would continue this restless movement around the country as well as in city streets in the decades that followed. An admirer of Jack Kerouac, he hitchhiked throughout Japan or found drivers willing to take him on the new highways at all hours of the day and night, stopping at deserted cafes and photographing through car windows, inspired by Kerouac’s On the Road. His subjects included popular entertainment and the experimental theater of Shuji Terayama, as found in the pictures of his first book, Japan: A Photo Theater(1968). The nonpolitical Moriyama found in the rich complexities and dark ambiguities of the times his special subject.īeginning in the mid-1960s, Moriyama contributed regularly to camera magazines published for the amateur, especially the important Camera Mainichi, producing pictures for these publications that were essentially poetic rather than journalistic. ![]() He was attracted to the culture there: to the jazz music, to the honky-tonk joints and the heterogeneity of their clientele, and to the exuberance of the soldiers. ![]() Moriyama responded most of all to the vitality and fleshy dissipations he observed at the American bases near where he lived, in Zushi, then teeming with American servicemen fighting the Vietnam War. Later he saw work by William Klein and Andy Warhol, whose photographs, provocative and raw, exposed a society of vibrant estrangement in New York. ![]() “This kind of theatricality is not just a metaphor but is also, I think, our actual reality.” Moriyama worked as an assistant to Eikoh Hosoe while the older photographer made his portrait series of the novelist Yukio Mishima, pictures of theatrical sexuality. “Chaotic everyday existence is what I think Japan is all about,” he has said. These and other factors stimulated a period of radical art-making. He belongs to the generation who matured in the decades following Japan’s surrender-who lived in urban centers and experienced the country’s submission to occupation and political pressures by its “liberators,” as well as its emergence as a vibrant economy. 1938) has restlessly portrayed the emotional condition of everyday postwar Japan. A seminal photographer of lyrical, expressionist sensibility, Daido Moriyama (b.
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