“When I am travelling, I take photographs that are guided by my feelings and physical obsessions or fetishes.”
In 1968, inspired by Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road (1957), Moriyama decided to travel in Japan. He wanted to photograph a continuous surface instead of individual scenes, crossing reality with his camera and shooting away “with the automatic speed of a machine gun.”
The trip became an obsession. “I was more used to the hard beds of the hotel rooms than to my own bed, to the curried ribs in the drive-in than to my wife’s home cooking.”
After publishing a few articles and three years on the road, he gave himself up to re-examining his work and producing the book A Hunter (1972). A kind of a photographic road novel, the book brings together scenes of roads, trips and slanted horizons, as glimpsed from the window of a car. Moriyama insert photos from all his career to that set, tracing his path through life as a long, graphical highway.
With a method he still follows, scenes from Camera Mainichi, Provoke and “Accidents” resurface in new directions and meanings, in contexts that are different to the original. His photography became closer to the ideograms of the Japanese language, which change the way they are read according to the context in which they are used.
The darkness and fugacity of the images were a relentless hunt for fleeting reality, but also the reflection of a tormented soul. “What Moriyama is condemning is not the universe, neither the world, nor the United States, nor Japan, nor society, nor his friends, his family, his wife, his children – none of that. It is, perhaps, above all, his own ego,” concluded his friend Tadanori Yokoo.
Photographs, gelatine silver, 2022. Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation Archives.
A Hunter (Kariudo, 1972)
A projection based on the book of the same name, with narration of the text “On the Road” by Daido Moriyama. The sequence follow the order of the original book. Translation from the Japanese by Leiko Gotoda. Narration in Japanese: Tatewaki Nio. Narration in Portuguese: Carol Dall Farra.
“On the Road: Tokyo Ringroad, National Highway 16”, Camera Mainichi, Oct. 1969. Reproductions: Getsuyosha Publishing House.
“You might say the act of following that one long, gray line of highway in one’s own way is similar to watching a movie or reading something. When I am going along the road, snapping the shutter as I read each moment, I become at times a poet, a scientist, a critic, a philosopher, a laborer or a politician.”