A Fossil of Light and Time: Daido Moriyama

A pioneer of evocative, artistic photography in postwar Japan, Moriyama was closely associated with the art/photography magazine Provoke which was a milestone for avant garde and street photography. Moriyama and Provoke helped to shape the “are-bure-boke” style – translated to “grainy/rough, blurry, out-of-focus” which pushed the boundaries of capturing the moment with a camera.

It strikes me that it’s hard to fathom a time when photography was not considered art. In today’s world of instant camera gratification, ‘grammable sunset shots and photographers launching their careers through a hashtag, it can be hard to remember that for almost the entirety of the camera’s existence it was thought of as a journalistic tool and not a medium for artistic expression. While there were a few photographers who pushed the notion of photography as art in the first half of the 20th century like one of my personal favorites, the immortal Alfred Stieglitz, photography as art didn’t really come into its own as an art form until the 1960s.

A relatively new medium, artists shied away from embracing the possibilities of the photograph as art for many reasons: it was expensive, it wasn’t established in the canon of “acceptable” art, it was too “easy” to just point and shoot. Photographers like Daido Moriyama, however, saw the possibility of the immediacy of photography. Moriyama and his compatriots at Provoke challenged the status quo of a Japan that was still reeling from the loss of World War II and the psychologically shattering effects of the atomic bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. What Moriyama and the Provoke crew were attempting to do was to hold up a mirror to the grit and grime of the underside of Japanese society that was hoping to just put on a brave face and move past the events of the middle part of the 1940s.

Photography’s ability to anchor events in time gave Moriyama the key he needed to capture not just the idea of an instant, but the feeling of experiencing hundreds of thousands of small instants that makes up a life:

“My photos are often out of focus, rough, streaky, warped, etc. But if you think about it, a normal human being will in one day perceive an infinite number of images, and some of them are focused upon, others are barely seen out of the corner of one’s eye.”

Daido Moriyama was born October 9, in 1938.