“New York is filled by a vague scent of mescaline, while the smell of Andy Warhol is billowing out of every street.”
In Japanese society, the United States represented humiliating defeat and modernization, the destruction of a way of life, and the economic miracle. For Moriyama, the US was the land of William Klein, through whom he would begin to focus on the virulence of the images, and Andy Warhol, through whom he had tuned his ability to reflect conceptually.
In 1971, Moriyama embarked for New York on his first trip abroad, accompanied by graphic artist Tadanori Yokoo (1936).
“I admired how he returned to the same places, day after day, to take pictures with a small camera that takes more than 70 photos per roll. He would go back to the same streets we had walked in and pressed the shutter unpretentiously for the thousandth time. He reminded me of a dog pissing on telegraph posts,” recalls Yokoo.
The excitement of the city is remarkable. Buildings, cars, neon signs and passers-by are seen in dark, fragmentary images, with the visible grain and the abrupt framing of those who take a photograph without looking through the viewfinder. The half-frame camera used half a frame at each click, creating double-frames and doubling the number of shots per film. The are, bure, boke style enveloped Manhattan in a dense mist, rejecting clarity in favor of mimicking the personal experience.
Moriyama published his photos in Asahi Camera in 1972. In 1974, he revisited the material at the Printing Show in Tokyo. He recombined the images using a photocopier for the fanzine Another Country in New York, editing the material freely. “Low” quality reproductions and a DIY approach used the lessons of pop art in a challenging way to complete his work in America. The Printing Show was to be repeated from the early 2000s onwards.
New York, 1971. Photographs, gelatine silver, 2012. Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation Archives.
“New York”, Asahi Camera, April 1972. Reproductions: Getsuyosha Publishing House.
New York. Silkscreen in 2007. The search to question photography led Daido Moriyama to try out new ways to print his images. Still in 1974, he opened the Harley-Davidson exhibition, with life-sized silkscreen images of motorbikes.
Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation Archives.