1972
What is photography? With a simple question, Moriyama caused an earthquake.
In 1972, his book Farewell Photography! radicalized his mistrust of the reality of images. He enlarged unwanted negatives, the ends of rolls of film and discarded images, and delivered them to his editor Kineo Kuwabara.
“It might seem like a somewhat ironic title, but it´s about my feelings of hate and wanting to say farewell to spirituality peaceful photographs, to photographs that show no doubt what photography means, in other words photographs that lack reality.”
Farewell Photography! is a stunning sequence of grainy, cut, solarized and erased scenes. Fragments of personal essays and photo reports appeared almost unrecognizable, frustrating the attempt to establish nexus or meaning.
Photographs of the world were interspersed with copies of other images, while scratches, interference and margins reject the photographic illusionism. The book was actually a collision with reality, from which only fragments of prints and negatives remained.
Photography was a way to think about the world and establish his own identity. It was also a political position in relation to photography. “This naive belief that you can attempt to create masterpieces, this naive humanism that you can try and help people through your art is too optimistic for me. I am already struggling to cope with my own existence.”
The book was ignored by critics at the time, but went on to became a cult in the following decades, gaining the status against which he fought.
In addition to expressing a disenchanted skepticism and synthesizing the corrosive Westernization that dominated Japan, it was also the artist’s revolt against his submission to a photographic code and a devotional declaration to photography. “I tried to derail photography, but I ended up derailing myself,” he concluded.
Photographs in mineral pigment, 2022. Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation Archives.
Farewell Photography! (Sashin yo Sayonara, 1972)
“I did not understand my own questions: who am I when I shoot? What world does photography capture? What is this work that unites light, time and the visible world? Is photography a record or a work of art? What is the relationship between seeing and being seen? I was obsessed with strange concepts, and my questions seemed endless. Where was the end of photography?”