Photography Exhibition Daido Moriyama: Tokyo Color

Daido Moriyama is one of his generation’s most influential and renowned photographers. Since he began working in the 1960s, the artist has used photography to subvert conservative conventions of the medium, setting forth a more subjective style. Moriyama’s work is hallmarked by his snapshot aesthetic, capturing the discord of modern urban life with a loose, but commanding point of view.

Tokyo Color highlights Moriyama’s long engagement with color photography, featuring a slideshow of his early explorations with color film, alongside a series of his recent color prints. While best known for his high-contrast black and white images, color photography has been an integral part of his practice since the 1970s. Moriyama says, “The black and white tells about my inner worlds, my emotions and deep feelings that I feel every day walking through the streets of Tokyo or other cities, as a vagabond aimlessly. The color describes what I meet without any filters, and I like to record the instant for the way it looks to me. The first one is rich in contrast, is harsh and fully reflects my solitary nature. The second one is polite, gentle, as I set myself towards the world.” The images on view, all taken in the artist’s hometown of Tokyo, convey Moriyama’s ongoing fascination with his urban environment, and his practice of compulsively collecting impressions of the city’s vibrancy, as well as its vulgarities.

The exhibition also presents a selection of Moriyama’s iconic black and white “tights” portraits, a subject that the artist has continually revisited since his first series in the 1980s. The photographs focus on a woman’s legs in fishnets, erotically depicting the accentuation of the netting over the curves of the body. Closely cropped, these black and white images are studies in patterns, light and shadow, and form. The body of work highlights Moriyama’s interest in intrigue and seduction, themes that motivate the artist’s practice, and are also intrinsic to his photographs of Tokyo’s streets.

Daido Moriyama was born in Osaka, Japan in 1938 and currently lives and works in Tokyo. He has had major solo shows at international institutions including Tate Modern, London; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the National Museum of Art, Osaka; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Fotomuseum Winterthur, Switzerland; the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography; and most recently at the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, Paris, in 2016. His works are in prominent collections worldwide including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. In 2012 the artist received The International Center for Photography’s Lifetime Achievement Infinity Award.

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