Modena - Italy, Ex Ospedale Sant’Agostino
17 September – 14 November 2010

Opening in Modena-Italy on 17th September 2010, the exhibition Daido Moriyama. The World Through My Eyes is the biggest retrospective ever organised in Italy on the artwork of Daido Moriyama. Produced by the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Modena with the support of Japan Foundation and curated by Filippo Maggia, the show will present more than 450 pictures taken from the Sixties on, reconstructing the path of one of the most interesting figures of Japanese contemporary photography.

Day by day, all his lifelong, Moriyama has been taking thousands of photos, carrying on a ceaseless research. His pictures - contrasting black and white, often unfocused, grainy, scratched and overexposed - draw the whole artist’s existence: that of a bashful, solitary “hunter-photographer”, rootless and free from social conventions.
For Moriyama anything he comes across is worthy of attention: neither the subject or the author are the main element of his works, since there’s no distinction between the experienced reality and the reality depicted in the image – he often blends street photography with pictures of pictures elicited from magazines, posters, advertising, television.
What really matters is the partial fragment of experience that the photography discovers and fixes, the truth existing only in the meeting-point between the photographer’s sense of time and the scrappy nature of the world.

The show draws the viewer into Moriyama’s visual universe and to his approach to the world, offering at the same time an extremely lucid image of a country and its history, as well as the political, cultural and social transformations that have given form to present-day Japanese society.
Starting from the early Pantomime series, realized when Moriyama became a freelance photographer in his twenties, the exhibition presents some of his most important works, among which: Japan: a Photo Theater, from his book published in 1968 in collaboration with Shuji Terayama, and Itinerant Entertainers, realized in the same period; Hunter and Farewell Photography, whose publication in the early 1970s shocked Japanese photography people; Tales of Tono (1974), realised in the traditional Japanese countryside; Light and Shadow (1982) and the Shinjuku series, composed in the 1990s by snapshots taken on the narrow streets of Shinjuku town, depicted as a chaotic site of people's desires.

Moreover, a special series of pictures has been selected by Daido Moriyama around the theme of “Luck”, on the occasion of the festivalfilosofia, running from 17th to 19th September 2010 in Modena, Carpi and Sassuolo.

During the same period of Daido Moriyama’s retrospective, in the venue of Fotomuseo Giuseppe Panini in Modena, there will be presented a selection of works from the collection of contemporary photography of the Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio di Modena, focusing on Japanese art scene. Under the title Japan Contemporary, the exhibition includes photo and video works by Nobuyoshi Araki, Maiko Haruki, Ryuji Miyamoto, Daido Moriyama, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Risaku Suzuki and Miwa Yanagi.  

On the occasion of the exhibition, a photobook by Daido Moriyama will be published by Skira. Containing many of the pictures included the show, the volume includes an interview to the artist by Filippo Maggia, an essay by Akira Hasegawa and a biography by Francesca Lazzarini.

Daido Moriyama - Bbiographical notes

Hiromichi (Daido) Moriyama was born in Ikeda-cho, Osaka, in 1938. His father worked as a salesman in an insurance company, a job that required the family to move between several cities, including Hiroshima, Tokyo and Kyoto. In 1961 he moved to Tokyo, joining in the VIVO collective, which yet was about to dissolve. There he worked as Eikoh Hosoe’s assistant, in 1964 he started his career as a freelance-photographer and three years later he received the newcomer’s award from the Japan Photo-Critics Association. Meanwhile, he started contributing to various magazines; among these the most important one - although it was edited in barely three numbers - was “Provoke”, set up by Takuma Nakahira, Takahiko Okada, Yutaka Takanashi and Koji Taki.

Beyond the two famous series produced for “Provoke” – the first one took by night in a love hotel and the second one realised in an Aoyama drugstore in 1968, during the struggle between ‘AMPO’ and police - Moriyama performed between the Sixties and Seventies significant works, such as Japan: a photo theater, Scandal, Pantomime, Accident, Farewell photography, Hunter.

During the Nineties he achieved international success and started exhibiting his works worldwide in different museums and galleries, among which: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1999, 2009); New York Metropolitan Museum, Fotomuseum Winterthur (1999); London White Cube (2002); Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris (2003); Kunsthaus Graz, Museum of Contemporary Art, Vigo, Spain (2005); Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (2008).

Hereby the main publications: Japan: A Photo Theater, Muromachi Shobo (1968), The Japanese Box, Edition 7L/Steidl (2001), transit, Eyesencia, (2002), Daido Moriyama Complete Works vol.1, Daiwa Radiator (2001), Memories of a Dog, Nazraeli Press; Daido Moriyama Complete Works Vol.2/Vol.3/Vol.4, Daiwa Radiator (2004), Moriyama/Shinjuku/Araki, Heibonsha; Buenos Aires, Kodansha press (2005), Farewell Photography, Power Shovel Books, Tokyo (2006), Kyoku/Erotica, Asahi Shimbun Publications inc.(2007), Hokkaido, Rat Hole Gallery (2008).

Daido Moriyama: a conversation with Filippo Maggia
(abstract from the book)

Tokyo Shinjuku, 13th May 2010

Filippo Maggia. Daido, your real name is Hiromichi Moriyama. Where does Daido come from?

Daido Moriyama. My name is composed of two characters: hiro + michi. Hiro means “wide” and michi means “street”, literally “wide street”. But these two characters can also be read as dai and do, which gives us Daido. This is the most natural and direct reading, and when people saw my name written they would pronounce it Daido, even though I explained every time: no, you’re wrong, it reads “Hiromichi”. Then after a while I gave up, and became Daido.

FM. So, it’s as if your destiny was already in your name, seeing that the theme of travelling is central to your work and you have already come a long, long way.

DM. Yes, there must be some connection, though to be honest I prefer narrow streets to wide ones. In any case, the streets are the setting for thousands of my photographs and, in some cases, the actual subject. So my having that name is very strange: it’s exactly the right one for me.

FM. You were born in 1938 and your childhood coincided with the Second World War, right up to its terrible conclusion. Do you have memories of that period?

DM. I remember many things about the war, different events and situations. I was seven years old and in my first year at elementary school when the war ended in 1945. At that age I was not at all frightened and the devastation of war did not seem real to me. I have memories, but horror is not one of them.

FM. You knew and worked with two great Japanese masters: Shomei Tomatsu and Eikoh Hosoe, becoming the latter’s assistant. With whom do you have more in common?

DM. Shomei Tomatsu, definitely. I remember how excited I was by Shomei Tomatsu’s photos when I saw them. His work was really crucial to my artistic formation, a true point of reference. Eikoh Hosoe was my master from a technical standpoint, he was the one who taught me how to photograph. However, his research is expressed in very dramatic visions with surrealist overtones, while Shomei Tomatsu’s is more like mine: an endless exploration of the world, an inexhaustible desire to recount the city, the streets and the people who inhabit them.

FM. You read On the Road by Jack Kerouac in the prime of youth, and he became an important travelling companion for many years. I’m intrigued by your interest in an American writer, since I don’t know how well-known or appreciated he would have been in Japan during the US occupation. But I’m even more intrigued by the fact that a young Japanese was so struck by Kerouac that he adopted his book as a kind of Bible and literally went “on the road”.

DM. During that period I read a lot and was struck by many things, I was very receptive and open-minded. Jack Kerouac had a gift for creating photographic images of his travels, with his typewriter. This ability of his influenced and conditioned the path I later took. What struck me so deeply about On the Road was the theme of freedom and wandering: travelling for the pleasure of it, with no specific destination in mind. For me travel means being on the move, rather than reaching a particular place.

FM. In the literature by these authors the protagonist is nearly always a loner who wanders aimlessly and who, through his endless roaming, contributes to the creation of invented worlds. A chain of experiences, one after the other, generates images, projections of reality. In the end, these images and reality are the same thing. This process seems very similar to your method of working.

DM. Yes, I can really identify with that way of feeling. I’m primarily interested in recounting the streets and the people who animate them and bring them alive, in narrating reality. But the story is mine: it is not a news camera that is recording what is happening out there, but Daido telling you about the road he is following.
[…]

FM. You select fragments of reality through photography.

DM. Let me try to explain: the external surface that appears before my eyes constitutes a stimulus that unleashes an impulse, a reaction. I walk through the city streets with my camera, constantly bombarded by these stimuli. With my camera I am able to produce a reaction to these manifold solicitations, to respond to them. It is a constant repartee between reality and Daido. This is the relationship that is created. This is the way I see, know and participate in the societal life all around me. The process is repeated constantly, and it’s my way of photographing. It is not that I have particular subjects, abstract or well-defined forms in mind – they abound in the city and society… I think that my way of photographing consists in capturing some of the subjects in this multitude.
[…]

FM. Is there anything that Daido hasn’t been able to photograph?

DM. Rather than “not being able”, there are things I’ve never wanted to photograph. I’m completely unable to photograph something I don’t want to depict. Descriptive or didactic images, for example. I’ve never done them and I would never want to. I want to photograph things that I, too, don’t fully comprehend, the things I can’t explain – I can quite happily skip what I understand. Still, I have no intention of explaining anything with my photos. Those who look at them are free to interpret them how they like.

FM. … to all of us reality seems like an unsolvable mystery that photography can penetrate.

DM. What do you mean by mystery? Practically all of the reality projected before my eyes is a mystery, that’s why I explore it. This enigma has various facets: eroticism, suffering, amusement… There are many elements which, as a whole, undoubtedly constitute a never-ending puzzle. The raison d’être of photography lies here, in its capacity to represent this conundrum, but without the obligation or the responsibility of arriving at a solution, of unravelling the mystery. It is not possible to understand through one or even a hundred photographs. It’s like a riddle. More than a mystery, it seems to me like a maze. Walking through the city is like walking through a maze for me. I don’t want to provide answers, I prefer to leave the question unsolved, to leave the query about what is before us hanging there, even after looking at the images.

FM. Do you mean that we see a possible reality, but many different ones exist…

DM. By photographing a single reality, countless others can be seen. Different realities coexist within a single image. That’s the magic of photography.