1969
In 1968, the earth trembled. In Japan, the New Left grew, protesters opposed the Vietnam War and the renewal of the Treaty of Mutual Cooperation and Security with the USA, while students took to the streets and occupied the universities.
Distrustful of journalistic images, Moriyama started a monthly series in the magazine Asahi Camera in which he explored new visual ways to narrate accidents, incidents, and other events.
Influenced by his recent contact with the work of pop artist Andy Warhol, Moriyama used the magazine to reflect on the impact and reproducibility of images, their circulation and consumption.
He addressed the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, the sensationalism of the crime pages in the newspapers and of celebrity magazines, the consequences of the war and the occupation of Japan, man’s confrontations with nature, the challenges of industrialization, corruption and crime, among other burning issues which remain relevant in the present day.
His reflections also extended to photography itself and the new ethical and visual dilemmas it was facing. To produce his images, he used Kodak Tri-X film, from which he was inseparable, zoom lenses, high-contrast photographic paper, photocopiers, and video frames.
In his visual exercises, Moriyama began to develop a complex theory of the image, sharing it on the pages of a mass circulation magazine. He challenged the realism propagated by conventional journalism, brought photography closer to memory and history, and questioned the role of the photographer and media companies in influencing the news, still a very pertinent reflection. Many images in this series reappeared in other of Moriyama’s works.
Photographs, gelatine silver, 2022. Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation Archives.
Pages from Asahi Camera magazine. Reproductions: Getsuyosha Publishing House.
Accident 1: Images From a Certain Seven Days
January 1969
The series “Accident” began with a portfolio on the impact on Moriyama of the news of the murder of Robert F. Kennedy on June 5, 1968. The focus of the images was not so much the death of the US presidential candidate, as its repercussion in the media. Scenes from newspapers, magazines and TV screens were re-photographed and photocopied, reinforcing the growing distance between real events and the bombardment of images in the media.
Accident 2: Shinjuku, 25 Hours
February 1969
In the second edition, Moriyama reflected on ways to narrate an accident or incident, whether or not he was on the scene where it happened. In the 1960s, radio and TV stations went after the facts, but rarely witnessed the events firsthand. To increase the chances of actually seeing an incident when it happened, he would hitch a ride with the patrol cars circulating in the Shinjuku district. “Described by the police as ‘just one huge nightclub,’ Shinjuku is also one of Tokyo’s main shopping districts before dark, and is famous for its insalubrious residents after midnight,” explained the magazine. Despite his great expectations, the only incidents he saw were traffic accidents and drunken brawls.
Accident 3: Takada is Here Below
March 1969
Moriyama visited the city of Takada in the province of Niigata: “When he was a child, photographer Hiromichi [Daido] Moriyama, now 30 years old, lived in a snowy province and experienced the oppressive darkness under the white snow. We sent him to Niigata, which had record snowfalls this year, so he could show us what the snow means to the local residents. All transport stopped and commercial activities almost came to a halt because of the snow,” explained the magazine. In this third work, the challenge was to photograph a snowstorm, which was to a certain extent expected as it was due to natural causes.
Accident 4: Blind Spot
April 1969
The portfolio investigated the act of seeing and being seen by the camera, often associated with a weapon. “I wanted to capture the climate of danger that permeates the scene at the moment when practically defenseless people and objects pass in front of the camera’s viewfinder,” he said. Far from hurting his targets, Moriyama pointed a huge zoom lens at the city in search of fragments suggesting the hidden threats of everyday life. The result was similar to a film noir, foreshadowing current discussions about the use of surveillance cameras and the restriction of individual freedoms.
Accident 5: Between the Sky and the Sea
May 1969
Moriyama returned to a shipwreck a couple of weeks after the incident, to record the constant clash between man and nature, rather than the tragedy itself. Silhouettes, wreaths of flowers and an old ship were scenes from a specific place transformed into a story that would “be repeated infinitely.”
Accident 6: Crash
June 1969
Moriyama returned to the theme of death and reality in the images by framing a traffic poster from the National Police Agency together with a photo of a real accident. In a collision with the poster, he fragmented the image in high contrast, highlighting the details of the accident and the “inexplicable feeling of fear and shaking” that he felt when he was on road trips. “When will it be my turn to be caught up by this whirlwind,” he wondered. As part of the mass communications industry, his work was clearly influenced by Warhol’s Double Disasters, with whom he shared a morbid fascination for images of crime and an interest in the controlling role they exercised in society.
Accident 7: And Then There Were None
July 1969
Moriyama investigated the idea of slow and inexorable death by addressing the silent disappearance of Japanese villages. Japan’s small villages anticipated a global destination: “Like the many villages in the past submerged at the bottom of reservoirs, the situation where life is suddenly interrupted – and none left – is not just accidental. If we exaggerate a little, I think it implies something like the end of the world,” he explained. The title referred to Agatha Christie’s famous novel in which people are murdered one after the other on an island.
Accident 8: Celebrities
August 1969
Like Warhol, Moriyama was interested in the world of gossip and celebrities. He took as his theme, the affair between a film star and the ex-wife of the Indonesian President. In dealing with the romance, exploited with sensationalism in the TV and magazines, he reproduced details of the published photographs. By enlarging the printing grids, generally invisible to the naked eye, perhaps he was seeking a deeper sense in the images or a universal truth. Distinct from them, however, there was only the greed of the news corporations. “Our daily lives are already totally bound up with the large and small media companies which, without giving us a choice, expose us to an incalculable volume of data,” he commented, anticipating a movement that would network the contemporary world.
Accident 9: The City Is Dirty
September 1969
Moriyama investigated the social and environmental degradation of Japanese cities, displaying the dark side of the galloping industrialization generated by the economic miracle. In Kitakyushu, the port area of Fukuoka, he reflected on the loss of local identities and the infiltration of criminal organizations. The somber portfolio was a counterpoint to the euphoric globalization of the country, which celebrated the movement of people and the increase in consumption while slowly destroying traditional regions.
Accident 10: A Dark Sunday
October 1969
Concerned with human dignity, Moriyama photographed the beach at Zushi, where he lived. “Crowds on a beach covered with bodies slathered in olive oil, tightly packed, gazing at a sea that is a sewer. I see this dark landscape as something tragic and also accidental,” he explained. Pollution and overcrowding were suggested by the high contrast and the repetitive images of the crowd in the sheet of contact prints. “They say that this is an era of devastation, that humanity is on the path to extinction,” he concluded, in a hopeless realism.
Accident 11: On the Death of a Girl
November 1969
His concern for human dignity continued in this chapter, in which he criticized the sensationalism surrounding the abduction and death of a child. He sharply criticized the coverage, saying “The standardized realism of the reporting or even the pretended and naive humanism do not solve problems at all.” “For me, it is unthinkable to go to the home of the victims to convey a tragic reality, or to report every reaction of those involved,” he concludes. Attempting to cover the terrible incident without using sensationalist images of the incident, he published frames from TV news reports which suggested a criminal investigation. In rejecting direct representation, he denounced the transformation of human tragedies into a source of profit, a tendency that has persisted and become worse up to the present day.
Photographs, gelatine silver, 2010. Gallery Akio Nagasawa collection
Accident 12: October 21
December 1969
“The history of humanity has always been a history of tragedies marked by sheet upon sheet of the blood and tears of the masses,” he declared, when photographing on the streets of Shinjuku on the nationwide Anti-War day. The last chapter was one of the rare moments when he produced images typical of photojournalism by documenting the protests that took over the city. To record the tragedies affecting citizens is “to approach them as someone who is in the same position,” he concludes. “In the stunning cityscape of Shinjuku on October 21, accompanied by the image of a lone young man throwing a bottle with the fuse lit, moved by a burning and indescribable impulse, I have no option but to continue photographing to document the tragedies of a people,” he said.