Are, Bure, Boke, Konpura: Daido Moriyama, The Body Photographer

By Thomas Gibbs

*Trigger warning – some photography contains nudity and themes of a sexual nature.*

Daido Moriyama (born October 10th, 1938) is a Japanese photographer best known for his distinctive style of black and white urban street photography, characterised as are, bure, boke, konpura (‘rough, blurred, out-of-focus, contemporary’). He trained in the studio Takeji Iwamiya (1920–89) in Osaka from 1959-61, before moving to Tokyo to seek out the Vivo photographic group. Although this dissolved around the time of his arrival, he continued to be influenced by their style. Later he was associated with the avant-garde group Provoke, who sought to challenge the nature of photography as a medium. In 1985 Moriyama said that he took photos ‘more with my body than my eyes’, to this end he often pressed the shutter without looking through the viewfinder, or even while aiming out of a moving vehicle. This creates a unique aesthetic that emphasises emotional response and authorship through the manipulation of the medium.

Like many Japanese artists, Moriyama’s work touches upon the loss of Japanese identity amongst a sea of US-led commercialism and internationalism. This is, of course, a recurrent concern for Japan, which from the late-16th to mid-19th centuries pursued a policy of isolationism under the Shogunate. This photo of Campbell soup tins on a supermarket shelf from the series Aoyama (1969) is a conscious reaction to Andy Warhol’s work. Moriyama takes Warhol’s comment on modern consumerism and infuses it with the Japanese concern of native culture being replaced with foreign brands. His distinctive blurred style here erases all details, prices, text, and flavours – Moriyama decontextualises the soup until all that remains is the branding. The black and white film with heavy grain, distances Moriyama’s work from Warhol’s colourful pop art, and lends it a darker, more uncomfortable quality.

Daido Moriyama, Aoyama, 1969. Collection of the Tokyo Institute of Polytechnics.

Moriyama’s style is more than just an aesthetic. It is overdetermined, infused with multiple meanings and intended to be read as such. Following the ukiyo-e tradition, he turned to his equivalent of the ‘floating world’, capturing fleeting snapshots of Tokyo’s prostitutes and strippers that paint the world of the night as fleeting and ephemeral. At the same time, the focus on role and societal position, and focus on the superficial details of masks or make-up covered faces - particularly in his first photobook of theatre performers Nippon gekijō shashinchō (‘Japan: A photo theatre’, 1968) - suggests that photography can penetrate no further than the surface and is unable to get to deeper meaning.

Critic Carter Ratcliffe argues that Moriyama’s photos are full of surface-level interaction, without deep connection. This can be seen in the backward glance of his Stray Dog (1971), or the blank stare of the couple in Housing Development, Tokyo (1967). In Soldiers, Hamamatsu (1968) the soldiers may be politely looking up to greet Moriyama but there is no friendliness in their gaze. In fact, they look just past the lens, by keeping the lens low, Moriyama avoids eye-contact in a slightly uncomfortable way. His photograph of Mutsumatsushima (1974) takes this to a disturbing new level. One of the boy’s eyes rolls into his head while the other remains fixed on us, still vacant. The angle of the photograph and glow around his silhouette make this a deeply unsettling image. Yet even in Soldiers Moriyama uses photographic technique to convey emotion. The harsh white light, and string contrast obscures the details of these men’s faces, simultaneously rendering them generic and homogenous (like their uniforms) and refusing to let the audience connect with them.

Daido Moriyama, Soldiers, Hamamatsu, 1968, gelatine silver print. MOMA (not on display) (Source: moma.org)

Daid Moriyama, Japan's Scenic Trio, Mutsumatsushima, 1974, gelatine silver print. Private Collection.

Moriyama always rejected the idea that his work had themes, preferring to be inspired by ‘the shock that comes from the outside’. Nonetheless certain ideas come up repeatedly in critical interpretations of his work. Moriyama’s exploration of disconnectedness and social isolation reaches its apogee in his depiction of naked women, particularly sex workers. Like the soldiers these figures are depersonalised through photographic technique. Sometimes, they are shot from behind, as in the conventional nude On The Bed I, Tokyo (1969), or in the much more unsettling Whore, Yokosuka (1970), where the subject is voyeuristically pursued by the photographer, chased into the narrowing darkness of an alleyway. The extreme contrast between her short white dress and the night sky means it swallows her head, decapitating her and removing any identifying features. His unusual angles also lend themselves well to cropping to remove faces. This depersonalisation through photographic technique (blurring, cropping or contrast) is a recurring motif in Moriyama’s photos of sexualised subjects, all three can be seen in Provoke no. 2.

Daido Moriyama, Whore, Yokosuka, 1970, silver gelatine print. MOMA (not on display). (Source: moma.org).

Daido Moriyama, Provoke no. 2, 1969, gelatine silver print (likely ferrotyped). Private collection. (Source: sothebys.com).

Daido Moriyama, How to Create a Beautiful Picture 6: Tights in Shimotakaido, 1987, gelatine silver print. Private collection.

The objectification and abstraction of the sexualised figure reaches its purest expression in the erotically charged 1987 series Tights. Women in fishnets are shot so close up that their forms are reduced to abstract lines and any semblance of personhood is removed. The result is still erotic, but obscurely so. Moriyama’s says that ‘black-and-white photography has an erotic edge for me, in a broad sense’.  Seeing in black and white gives him an instant rush colour photography has never mimicked.

Here the concern is not with the photographer but the viewer. In a 2011 interview Moriyama stated that ‘A single photograph contains different images.’ Different meanings for different people. He reflected on the way he rediscovered and reinterpreted his older photographs now, allowing third parties to curate them in sequences might be seen as taking control away from the artist. Moriyama, however, said that this allows the different images within the photograph to be teased out, ‘Filtering the images through their eyes, the photographs come alive, I think’.

Hokkaido (photographed 1978, photobook 2008, installation 2017) is a great example of this reinterpretation. Presented first as a photobook, then as an installation at Modern One in Edinburgh, Moriyama’s work doesn’t transcend its presentation, rather the different presentations make new of the same old photographs. An immersive digital projection creates a different atmosphere to a glossy sequence of photos, and the audience often walks in midway through his non-sequential journey across the Northern Japanese island. This all affects the viewer’s experience of Moriyama’s photographs.

Daido Moriyama, Hokkaido, Japan, 1978, silver gelatine print. (Source: www.polkagalerie.com)

Hokkaido is representative of Moriyama’s fascination with rural Japan in the 1970s. Suffering depression, the artist moved away from the city and took up the preferred subject of his former master, Takeji Iwamiya, who he had left 17 years previously. Tales of Tono (1974) has been argued to represent Moriyama’s first attempt at rediscovering the timeless nature of pre-industrial Japan. If that is the case, Hokkaido is Moriyama’s admission that such an attempt is doomed to failure.

Hokkaido came at a low point in Moriyama’s life, his depression such that by the end of the 1970s he had abandoned photography entirely. Despite shooting 250 rolls of film on the island of Hokkaido in just three months, his almost 2000 photographs lay untouched for nearly 30 years before he recompiled them into a photobook in 2008. More than a documentary of day-to-day life in rural Japan, the installation expresses simultaneously a love for Japan through its isolated landscapes, and depiction of rural life, and the photographer’s mental state. The landscapes are beautiful but desolate, pre-industrial life is captured in intricate detail but without connection; again, Moriyama recognises that all he can record is surface.

Throughout his lifetime Moriyama explored the duality of photography as a medium, being at once a ‘cold’ accurate record of things as they happened - ‘a fossil of light and time’ - and an expression of emotion. Three decades on, Moriyama’s reinterpretation of his own photographs demonstrates this dualism. His photographs are multifaceted and open to interpretation but above all they are a challenging and often disturbing take on the mundane subjects of everyday Japanese life.

Notes:

Iizawa, Kohtaro, and Fraser, Karen M. "Moriyama, Daido." Grove Art Online, 2003 [Accessed 17 Oct. 2022] https://www.oxfordartonline.com/groveart/view/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.001.0001/oao-9781884446054-e-7000059652.

Moriyama, Daido, and Vartanian, Ivan. “Daido Moriyama: The Shock from Outside. Interview with Ivan Vartanian” in Aperture, No.203 (2011): pp.22–31

National Galleries Scotland, ‘Hokkaido’ [Accessed October 17, 2022] https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/158913.

Ratcliff, Carter. ‘Surface Acts: The Photographs of Daido Moriyama’ in Art on Paper, Vol.4, No.5 (2000): pp.46–50.