RECORD No.35+36
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Artist
Daido MORIYAMA
森山大道
Born 1938 in Osaka. After working as an assistant for photographers Takeji Iwamiya and Eikoh Hosoe, he went independent in 1964. He has been publishing his works in photography magazines among others, and received a New Artist Award from the Japan Photo Critics Association for Japan: A Photo Theater in 1967. Between 1968 and ’70 he was involved in the photo fanzine Provoke, and his style of grainy, high-contrast images that came to be referred to as “are, bure, boke” (grainy, blurry, out-of-focus) made an impact on the realm of photography. Solo shows at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain in Paris solidified Moriyama’s worldwide reputation, and in 2012, he became the first Japanese to be awarded in the category of Lifetime Achievement at the 28th Annual Infinity Awards hosted by the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York. The “William Klein + Daido Moriyama” exhibition together with William Klein at London’s Tate Modern in 2012-13 was a showdown of two immensely popular photographers that took the world by storm.
Publication
RECORD No.36
In early November, I had some business to do in the town of Zushi.
I have a house there and usually visit Zushi two or three times a year. The more I drive along the coast and down the roads in town each time, the more images of a young Takuma Nakahira inevitably flash across the back of my mind.
And that’s just natural, considering that some fifty years ago in the summer we were close friends who eagerly discussed their photographic dreams while walking together morning, noon and evening.
– Daido Moriyama, afterword
RECORD No.35
This past June, a photo book titled “Pretty Woman” was published by Akio Nagasawa Publishing. Containing color and black-and-white photographs on 400+ pages, this hardcover book with a colorful poppy design is in a way an encyclopedia of Tokyo vulgarities from my own personal point of view. Then, in July, I received a copy of the compilation “RECORD” from the London-based publisher Thames & Hudson, who had finally completed their year-long project collecting all previously published volumes of the “RECORD” journal from 1 to 30. After the initial five volumes of “RECORD” that I conceived and put together back in 1972, the journal was put on ice for quite a long time, until Akio Nagasawa’s request in 2006 encouraged me to continue with number 6, up to number 35, for which I am now writing these notes. If Thames & Hudson included all pages of “RECORD” in their book, it would have become an enormously massive tome, so they did select to some extent, but the result is still an impressively voluminous book.
Looking repeatedly at both of these two new photo books at the same time, I got a bizarre kind of feeling, as if looking at my own photographs and at once watching a totally strange world, full of sceneries that I had never seen before. It seemed as if the time that had passed between the photos taken in 1972 and those shot in 2017 had been erased, so that all the printed images in these two books suddenly appeared on the same level without that temporal depth. Rather than being a natural effect, considering that they were all made by the same photographer, it appears to me that this was a phenomenon that has to be attributed to something other than the primary recording capacity of photography as a duplication mechanism. Browsing through these two books, I was once again reminded of the sheer breadth and depth of the tool that is photography.
– Daido Moriyama, afterword