The journal Record by the Japanese photographer is published in facsimile by the Thames & Hudson (English edition) and Éditions Textuel (French edition): thirty 16-page issues in which Moriyama takes us on urban walks through the night in broad daylight.
“For us, street photographers, there is no other way than buzzing like flies and taking a bite of anything we can find,” Moriyama wrote in August 2009 in the preface to the twelfth issue of his journal Record. Created in 1972, this self-curated periodical brings together the photographer’s latest pictures taken on his walks through the streets of countless cities. Encouraged by a friend, Daido Moriyama returned to the project in 2006, after a thirty years’ hiatus, to publish at the rate of four issues a year. Since then, over thirty albums have seen the light of day, and the artist, aged 80, keeps going.
The images are impressions of an inveterate walker who meanders through the labyrinth of big cities. In Tokyo, London, Paris, the photographer clings to the street and delivers the most peculiar visions: a jungle of electric wires, wheels abandoned by the roadside, peeling posters, hawkers, a crab in an aquarium, crocodiles in water tanks… He also manages to always slip in a self-portrait: his own reflection in a mirror or his shadow grazing the image. “To me the style of my own city snapshots amounts to pecking and plucking all sorts of views of people and various backdrops that I come across in the street,” he explained in October 2013.
What the street ferries along
In addition to being an exceptional compilation of photographs, Record contains the photographer’s written impressions. It’s an intimate oeuvre, not unlike a diary, in which Moriyama jots down his thoughts about photography and his own work process. He thus explains his predominant use of black and white photography by his love of “its capacity for symbolic abstraction”; then, as if to contradict himself, he does the next series in color.
Representing a singular vantage point in the world of photographers, Daido Moriyama is fond of close-ups of anything the street may ferry along, like garbage and flowers, human and animal, architecture and no-man’s land. His views are muddied with matte darkness from which matter emerges like from a thick texture, as when a painter adds layers of paint onto his canvas in order to breathe life into it. “Our daily life is stuck between the already-seen and the never-to-be-seen, which amply justifies our going out to capture it,” he writes.
Hunting the bizarre
Another emotion that comes over the reader of this compilation is the feeling one gets following the photographer on his journeys, which he documents with his incomparable eye. Thus, in January 2009, he walked around Osaka, Japan, capturing a baroque dimension of the city. Similarly, in his photographs taken in Florence, Italy, in April 2011, Daido Moriyama continues to hunt the bizarre and the uncanny in the heart of a top tourist destination. Ironically, when the photographer offers a view other than of a tourist attraction, it’s as if he were taking exception to that method, finding beauty elsewhere, in a wine bottle shattered on the pavement or a woman’s pump left behind in the middle of a street.
Jean-Baptiste Gauvin
Jean-Baptiste Gauvin is a journalist, writer, and stage director. He lives and works in Paris.
Daido Moriyama, Record
Published by Thames & Hudson
£50 / $70
https://thamesandhudson.com/daido-moriyama-9780500544662
