Texts by Shūji Terayama
“I wondered if, by removing each of the photographs I had taken over the last few years from their original context, treating them as fragments, and then recomposing these various fragments in a completely different context, with the same treatment, I could reconstruct the confused visions of everyday life?”
The result of winning an award for up-and-coming artists, Moriyama’s first book included plays and songs from the playwright Shūji Terayama which were concerned with sexual obsessions, hypnosis and prison life, as well as the story of a naive and incendiary young woman passionate about a boy imprisoned for subversive activities. “Great causes come before private problems,” summed up the protagonist, evoking the costly dilemmas of post-war youth.
Terayama’s surreal text echoed his work with the experimental theater group Tenjō Sajiki, and was interspersed with two sequences of photographs, starting with an image of the actor Isamu Shimizu in costume for a show. The sequence shuffled pictures of different subjects, omitting the original contexts. Men, women, performances and street scenes were momentary scenes from an irreverent opera. Moriyama sought to overcome the pretentiousness of photojournalism by using the images to synthesize complex realities. His photographic spectacle celebrated fragmentation and incompleteness, making it clear that the reality of the book was the reality of the images.