1990
“There may remain some fragments of memory still lying in the depths of my experience waiting to be awakened, and they are ready to evoke new memories at any time. Of course, I need to interpose a camera into that place.”
His admiration for Nicéphore Niépce, one of the inventors of photography in France, and for his pioneering photograph known as View from the Window at Le Gras (1826-27), led Moriyama to pay tribute to them in this series: “It seems to me again that the scene in Saint-Loup, taken and then fossilized, is the original scene of my photography before it became the origin of my own photography,” he says. “This fossil-like scene is nothing more than the memory of light. And the memory born by the first photograph of the world definitely does not belong to Niépce, who took the photo, or to me, who face it. I believe that unique image to be a memory of the world. … The only place where all these cycles of light and memory converge is the ‘story’.”