Curated by Thyago Nogueira
1964-1980
“I don’t know if individual photographs contain ideas, worlds, history, humanity, beauty, ugliness or nothing at all. I actually do not really care. I just extract and record things around me, without any pretense.”
In his 60 years as a photographer, Daido Moriyama (1938) has transformed the way we see photography. He has used his camera to interrogate the world and his ideas to construct images. This retrospective exhibition occupies two floors of the IMS and is one of the largest ever mounted. It follows the career of one of the most original and influential names in international photography and includes around 250 of his works and dozens of publications, the result of three years of research.
Born in Osaka and growing up in post-war Japan, Moriyama embraced photography as a reproducible and accessible visual language, within the mass media industry. In his images, he synthesized the anguish that dominated his country in the face of the American military occupation and accelerated Westernization.
The first part of the exhibition includes his early works for Japanese magazines, the contestation of journalism and photographic realism, the experimentation offered by the magazine Provoke and his years on the road, concluding with the conceptual radicalization of Farewell Photography! (1972), a masterpiece that is 50 years old this year.
The second floor starts in the 1980s, when Moriyama overcame depression and a creative crisis. In the following decades, he investigated both his own essence and that of photography, in a profound reflection on reality, memory and cities. The synthesis of his path can be found in the magazine Record, which he continues to publish.
Moriyama photographed continually, using any camera available, often without looking through the viewfinder. His work has mainly been for the printed page, which is why those publications are central to this retrospective. He rejected the elitism of art, the veneration of rare copies and the dogmatism of photographic conventions, until he made the democratic aspect of photography his most radical asset.
Before the pandemic threatened our ability to live as social beings, he produced an elegy to the encounter and to the discoveries that our collective lives in cities offer us. To escape death, he pursued a transcendental truth for his images. If he had found that truth, his career would have come to an end. However, at the age of 83, he still takes photographs every day. The integrity with which he has questioned his art is what must guarantee him eternity.