Daido MoriyamaRecensioni

A collection of images taken in major urban centers in the United States and one in Tijuana.

Excellent examples of street photography

More great examples of his photography. Great advice “get outside!”

From the artist: "1974 was the first year that I went to Okinawa and it was exactly a one week stay. Most of the photos in this book are those I took during that trip. However, the purpose of the trip to Okinawa then was not to take photos but for Shomei Tomatsu, Eikoe Hosoe, Masahisa Fukase, Nobuyoshi Araki, and myself who all lived in Tokyo then to conduct a photo workshop with 'Photo Taking' as the main theme for 10 plus photographers and photo lovers living in Okinawa. Each time I found some time in between the 5 day Okinawa workshop schedule, I took along the only camera, a half size, I brought with me and shot approximately 2,000 cuts. I didn't set any theme to work along but hopped from place to place like a bird feeds itself, allowing the towns I encountered for the first time to guide me along."

The short-lived Japanese magazine Provoke, founded in 1968, is nowadays recognized as a major contribution to postwar photography in Japan, featuring the country’s finest representatives of protest photography, vanguard fine art and critical theory in only three issues overall. The magazine's goal was to mirror the complexities of Japanese society and its art world of the 1960s, a decade shaped by the country’s first large-scale student protests. The movement yielded a wave of new books featuring innovative graphic design combined with photography: serialized imagery, gripping text-image combinations, dynamic cropping and the use of provocatively "poor" materials. The writings and images by Provoke's members―critic Koji Taki, poet Takahiko Okada, photographers Takuma Nakahira, Yakata Takanashi and Daido Moriyama―were suffused with the tactics developed by Japanese protest photographers such as Nobuyoshi Araki, Eikoh Hosoe and Shomei Tomatsu, who pointed at and criticized the mythologies of modern life. Provoke accompanies the first exhibition ever to be held on the magazine and its creators. Illuminating the various uses of photography in Japan at the time, the catalogue focuses on selected projects undertaken between 1960 and 1975 that offer a strongly interpretative account of currents in Japanese art and society at a moment of historical collapse and renewal.

This is Moriyama's second book which pays homage to the inventor of photography, Nicephore Neipce (his first book is "Lettre a St. Loup"). In 2008, he traveled to France to fulfill a life-long dream. To be more precise, he went to the birthplace of photography, in the village of Saint-Loup-de-Varenes, to an estate called Le Gras. The title, "View from the Laboratory" makes reference to the first permanent photograph, "View from Le Gras" captured by Nicephore Neipce (in 1827) from the window of his laboratory. At the end of this thin book, Daido wrote several pages of text (in Japanese and translated into English). He describes his visit with great reverence and appreciation towards the well known inventor of photography. Daido's images are mostly straight forward black and white images of the house, labratory room and the surrounding countryside. The subdued photographs seem a bit more in focus than some of his other work; they lack the energy and "edge" that his best work has. The hardcover book is housed in a sturdy black slipcase.½

A beautiful packaging of this body of work, shot in the NYC I am nostalgic for with a 35mm half-frame camera. Moraiyama is one of the best photographers in book form - in the pantheon with Koudelka.

779.05 P9697 2016