2007
“Now, when I am walking through a real city with my camera in my hand, I am listening to the memories of the dreams of a city that once existed, and also glimpsing a modest documentation addressed to the dreams of the city that is to come.”
Moriyama renewed street photography within and beyond Japan. His interest in walks led him to wander for miles through Tokyo, Osaka, Hokkaido, São Paulo, Paris, Marrakesh and Buenos Aires, as well as many other cities. He would take photographs using just one hand, often without looking through the viewfinder. Like the movie theaters of his childhood, the cities constantly raised the curtain on new scenes – all that was required was to walk and look.
In 2007, he photographed São Paulo in partnership with photographer Miguel Rio Branco, who in turn dedicated himself to photographing the Japanese capital. As in Shinjuku, his favorite district, Moriyama recognized in the Brazilian metropolis the absence of marks of the passage of time. Everything was ruin and construction in a constant scriptural palimpsest. “The almost endless views of lines of skyscrapers were something that surpassed Tokyo. ‘Chaos’ would be the precise word to describe my first impression,” he recalls.