One of the greatest names in post-war Japan, DAIDO MORIYAMA (1938) was part of the generation that explored the relationship between photography and the printed page. One of the founders of the legendary magazine Provoke (1968-69) and well known for his many books of black and white photography, Moriyama captured the artistic scene in Japan and the transformations of rural and urban life in his country. In this autobiographical series entitled Memories of a Dog, which was published in 1983 in the magazine Asahi Camera, the photographer reveals his fascination with American culture, road travel, his moments of self-knowledge and the seminal work of Jack Kerouac.
I read the novel On the Road some time ago, at a time when, barely into my mid-20s, I was experiencing the intense pleasure of clicking away with my camera in the quick rat-a-tat-tat of a machine gun burst.
LATE AFTERNOON IN MANHATTAN, and while contemplating the impressive crowd of black crows that flood into the streets like dirty water bubbling out of the dark mouth of the subway exit on the sidewalk, right in the center of the arid neon of Times Square, one man is thinking of another man whom he has just said goodbye to after traveling a long, long road together, and thinking of his many other friends, thinking of the stunning stretch of the “road already traveled” that, winding and endless, cuts the immensity of the American continent. “So in America when the sun goes down and I sit on the old broken-down river pier watching the long, long skies over New Jersey and sense all that raw land that rolls in one unbelievable huge bulgeover to the West Coast, and all that road going, all the people dreaming in the immensity of it, and in Iowa I know by now the children must be crying in the land where they let the children cry, and tonight the stars’ll be out […] and nobody, nobody knows what’s going to happen to anybody besides the forlorn rags of growing old, I think of Dean Moriarty, I even think of Old Dean Moriarty the father we never found, I think of Dean Moriarty.” murmurs Sal Paradise, protagonist of the novel On the Road, by Jack Kerouac, the wandering writer, on the last page of the book.
I read the novel On the Road a while ago, at a time when, barely into my mid-20s, I was experiencing the intense pleasure of clicking away with my camera in the quick succession of a machine gun burst. Fascinated by the “eyes that saw the road” of the main character Sal Paradise, I fell in love with his way of living and immediately decided to acquire a friend’s beaten up old Toyota, so that I could travel the many routes that run through Japan. It was at that time that I had the chance to see and experience a wide variety of events, people and cities, and it was also in those days
that I learned to hitch a ride in cars and trucks. And so, with my eyes always fixed on the surface of the road like a pair of headlights, I became addicted to that life, and I found myself both physically and spiritually unable to return to my old routine.
The youthful enthusiasm that led me to shoot my camera askew to the right was perfectly matched to the emotional pace of my travels and, changing partners all the time, I continued down the hypnotic road out there, photographing day and night, nonstop.
Now I wonder if I, who had been shy and introverted since I was a child, had not always been so fascinated by this kind of life and activity: prone to wandering off and disliking school, I had been lonely and withdrawn, a condition that perhaps developed in me an eagerness to behave like this.
The long stretches of highway which cross countless points, and also the city streets, where phenomena of every kind appear, awaited me with so many discoveries and emotions that recording them all would be impossible. I no longer felt comfortable in my home, where I returned exhausted, rung out, after stringing several long routes together, and ended up preferring the hard bed of a motel to my own, or the curried rice and breaded steaks of the drive-ins to rice to my wife’s home cooking. And before the siren call of the road died down, I rushed to head out on the road again. For no particular reason. The desire to see the Sea of Japan, for example, was enough. After continuing in this life for about three years, certain reasons led me to leave the road and head back home. And then I started to close in on myself once again.
When I was driving the highways, I often experienced moments of unspeakable irritation about the fact that I was irreparably attached to everything that, after a very brief meeting, flew away from me. In particular the profile of a woman’s pale face that slid past the corner of the windshield on a certain evening and readily dissipated on a corner, or even the gaze of a boy standing in the middle of the crop in full daylight are forever recorded on my retina, as vivid as the images from a movie I once watched.
I want capture on film all those endless things that are loved, just glimpsed, slipping by me and disappearing and, however much you photograph them, almost all of them run through the meshes of a net like water and go, leaving in my hands only precarious fragments of images that have captured nothing, something between a residual and latent image that submerges beneath my innermost self, building a thick layer of stratified sediments.
In fact, the images that flee from us are countless, as we move through an infinite succession of scenarios. The sensation of slipping by us comes hardly perceived at the moment such images pass by us. And all that remains is a growing sense of having lost them. However, the countless scenarios that escaped from me are capable of becoming another in my heart and, one day, suddenly resurging again. They transcend time and space and are reborn as a faint breath of air passing across my consciousness, completely detached from vision.
For example – on a busy corner in Tokyo, on the wall of a bar when the night is already old or in the developer liquid in a red-lit darkroom.
More recently, and after I started publishing the series Memories of A Dog, I took to the road again. Not as incessantly as before, but, on some nights, when I feel alone, I feel an insistent longing for that life, and I start to leaf through a road map and then follow any route printed on it with my eyes.
This encourages my urge to travel and, since last summer, I have been revisiting the highways. And then the almost forgotten emotion of being on them is reborn in me without me realizing it. At this point, a vast variety of fragments of old images seen along the way gradually come into focus, becoming real landscapes from these trips, appearing on the paper of the maps. It is like assembling a puzzle: by gathering together uncertain fragments, I am suddenly able to visualize the entire image. Before my eyes, the road emerges as a long, gray straight that stretches into the distance and, beyond it, projected into space in successive visions, a bleached summer scene along a route; fields and mountains in the vivid colors of early autumn; the dark scene of a narrow way in the depths of winter and, finally, the twilight sight of lights coming on in an unknown city. As I pursue images in my imagination, I understand the pulse of the Japanese archipelago in continuous moments and feel a passing irritation. I then wonder who was where and doing what at this very moment, or even what is happening and what is to happen.
For me, traveling along a long gray line corresponds to the act of reading at least a few dozen books of all kinds or, who knows, writing.
As I take a highway, clicking away and deciphering what is going on next to it, I am sometimes a poet, a scientist, an artist, a philosopher or even a politician.
In the old days, I would peek through the viewfinder of my camera while chewing lamen and curried rice to the sound of melodies of the past and popular songs while moving without rest through the Japanese archipelago.
And by bringing to the fore all those memories to react to the flow of time and space, the feeling that someday I will find a lush, regenerated image affects me, in alternating waves of hope and excitement.
Jack Kerouac, the author of On the Road, says that the jukebox is basically America’s coffin in homage to the work The Americans – which is a collection of photos taken by his friend and photographer Robert Frank – speaking of the jukeboxes that repeatedly appear in the work: “After seeing these pictures you end up finally not knowing anymore whether a jukebox is sadder than a coffin.” I borrow his allusion here to also say that the automated petrol stations that multiply on the edge of Japanese roads begin to look like real highway cemeteries. In their food areas – where we arrive in the early hours, exhausted from a long journey – we do not see a living soul and, under the glare of incandescent light, the icy ranks of cunning vending machines are wrapped in a sinister atmosphere that somehow reminds us of death. On the other hand, a period of total inactivity also comes upon us when we are traveling long distances. It might even be defined as a momentary pocket of air just before dawn. It happens at times when the darkness is denser and causes the strange impression that it is not the car which is driving along on its own, but it is being taken along a dark trench by a conveyor belt. A certain discomfort and apprehension takes hold inside the car while, silent, the traveling companions gaze deeply into the darkness, each immersed in their own thoughts. Only the light projected by the headlights and the illuminated dashboard are visible. On these occasions, I feel that at the center of human beings, in their very nerves and cells, although we are fearful of nature and civilization, we are somehow trying to challenge them. In other words, I start to imagine if this might not be the moment when man somehow comes into tune with ancestral memory.
Soon the sky on the distant horizon gradually starts to lighten and the dawn breaks in the rear-view mirror. Music flows from the cassette player, and all the cigarette lighters are simultaneously triggered. The smoke hangs in the air, a feeling of animation returns to the inside of the car, and everyone is released from their respective anxieties. The mornings on the highways are of a transparent, fathomless blue but, after a few hours on the asphalt, the daily skirmish will begin that, above all, reminds us of a battlefield. The issue is not “where we are going today,” but “what’s waiting for us today?”
Sal Paradise, the main character in On the Road, is the author of the work himself, Jack Kerouac. While wandering across the American continent with his friend Neal Cassady, they say that the writer, in his youth, banged away at the keys of his typewriter chewing burgers and apple pies to the sound of swing and bebop. And I, too, in my younger days, was spying through my camera’s viewfinder while chewing lamen and curried rice to the sound of melodies of the past and popular songs while traveling without rest through the Japanese archipelago. Perhaps it could be said that we would both persist in our moments of discovery and knowledge, with our own memories as radar. Jack Kerouac bequeathed us On the Road, an epic poem in praise of youth. And I too, though without any intention of making comparisons, published the photo collection The Hunter (Karyūdo), based on my own “eyes that saw the road.”
Translated from the Japanese into Portuguese by Leiko Gotoda. © DAIDO MORIYAMA PHOTO FOUNDATION