The desire and drama of Daido Moriyama’s photographs

It can be hard to imagine how radical the work of Daido Moriyama would have been when he first started walking the streets of Osaka and Tokyo with a small Canon 4Sb in the 1950s and ’60s. Before the age of ceaseless documentation, carrying a camera with you everywhere was a rare thing. Even with the passage of time, Moriyama’s images, now the subject of a major exhibition at The Photographers’ Gallery in London, have lost nothing of the urgency of modern street photography’s formative decades, or the uniqueness of his way of seeing. What makes any photograph art is the ability to capture something of the everyday with a new and intense focus — to force our eye and make us see what we otherwise would have only glimpsed, or ignored. This was Moriyama’s skill. His images are kinetic and haunted. They are often infused with a harsh, sometimes menacing beauty, so grainy and oversaturated that they have the feel of cinematic noir. Looking at the works on show, which span his early images of the 1960s to the present day, there’s a feeling of the photographer’s own shock of noticing.

Take, for example, “Stray Dog”, which remains one of his best-known works. A dog, quickly framed, turns back to regard the viewer. You can feel the animal’s muscular, heavy weight — low to the ground, both wolfish and bearish and yet also pleadingly vulnerable. Its matted fur is thrown into sharp relief by the sun and its eyes catch the light in a way that suggests intense awareness, or even madness. Moriyama’s trademark high contrast black and white gives the work a sense of documentary and slight horror. Like his other images of animals — cats, pigs, dogs — it seeks to be with them at their own level. He photographs them closely, capturing both their sentience and perhaps also their wariness.

“Stray Dog” was taken during a road trip where Moriyama would often photograph from the window of a moving car, and which later became the photobook A Hunter (1972). He found the dog near a US Air Force base in Misawa in 1971, and the image, with its undercurrent of anger and defensiveness, has come to stand in for the feelings and tensions of postwar Japan, a time of intense social, economic and political change as the country grappled with the repercussions of the atomic bombs that had been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the US-led military occupation. Moriyama has described the work as more of a self-portrait, likening himself to a dog that wanders and glares as he goes about his work.

Whatever meaning we may or may not ascribe to “Stray Dog”, there’s no doubt that the postwar years were highly formative for Moriyama’s aesthetic. Born in Ikeda, Osaka, in 1938, Moriyama had what he describes as an “ordinary” childhood. His father was an insurance salesman and the family moved often, perhaps seeding the rootless, peripatetic moods that can be felt in Moriyama’s practice. He began working in graphic design but found it too desk-bound, and left for Tokyo in 1961 to join the photographers’ collective Vivo, which sought to grapple with the rapid transformation of Japan after the US-led occupation. During those decades, western commercialism expanded rapidly, and its abrupt interaction with Japanese traditions resulted in changes both jarring and thrilling.

Although the collective soon disbanded, Moriyama was able to learn in terms of both style and technique from key figures such as Shomei Tomatsu and Eikoh Hosoe, the latter taking him on as an assistant. Photographers like Tomatsu, whose most famous image shows a watch frozen at 11:02, the exact time that the atomic bomb exploded in Nagasaki, saw the American influence as more of a destructive force on Japanese society. Moriyama, who was younger by almost a decade and had grown up with a mixture of cultures already present, including artists such as William Klein and Andy Warhol, tended towards a more observational tone. He was aware of the conflicts between modernisation and tradition, and yet accepted these changes with a sombre inevitability. His images capture the striking and sometimes garish appearance of western advertising, dress and signage on the streets of Tokyo: a group of youths with a James Dean-air lounging around their motorcycles in leathers and denims in Harumi, their faces overexposed to the point of being whited-out; a figure enveloped by a huge leopard-print fur coat; giant cans of mass-produced cream-style corn towering over the aisle of a supermarket.

While acutely attuned to the social atmosphere of the times, Moriyama was never doggedly political. What seemed to spur him was a sense of how drama and desire can be revealed in an ordinary instant. He has said that what he is looking for is a sense of the surreal or a reawakening of dormant memory: “My underlying thought was to show how in the most common and everyday, in the world of the most normal people . . . there is something dramatic, remarkable, fictional.”

To capture anything in an aesthetic way is to change it, often romantically

In the late 1960s, Moriyama joined another collective, Provoke, whose manifesto rejected any concept of the photograph as an idea and instead embraced something more fragmentary and subjective. They sought images that were raw and immediate, exposing the photographer as having a bodily encounter with reality, working in a style that came to be known as are, bure, boke (grainy, blurry and out of focus). In one 1990 photograph, a woman exposes the whites of her eyeball to Moriyama’s lens. In another, simply titled “Tokyo” (circa 1971), a woman in the foreground tilts her head quizzically to look back, in a mirror perhaps, at the photographer behind her taking her picture. It’s a recursive motion, shot in a closed room with a yellow overhead light that illuminates the woman’s hair, her shoulder, and the air between them. Like so many of Moriyama’s images, it’s instantaneous, almost an accident.

But he always came back to the same subject: the city. He would wander around Tokyo, particularly areas like Shinjuku with its dense alleyways, clubs, hotels and tiny bars, shooting rapidly and instinctually. His images reflect the hard-bitten mythmaking of these streets — the particular hallucinogenic tension of cities as places where one is among strangers yet hunting for connection, where so much is available for purchase and so little true satisfaction had. In one photograph, a figure in silhouette stands before a brightly lit restaurant on a busy street, two bands of light encircling the building. There is something haunted and lonely here, amid all the fluorescence and crowds.

For a time, Moriyama lost faith in photography’s capacity to shape the world and not just exploit it

In photography, and in writing too, there is the difficulty of interpretation. To capture anything in an aesthetic way is to change it, often romantically. Art gives things shape, frame, perspective and, even in the depths of horror or alienation, beauty. Moriyama felt the fraughtness of these tensions throughout his career and for a time during the 1970s gave up photography, publishing Farewell Photography in 1972. He had lost faith in the medium’s capacity to shape the world and not just exploit it, and was feeling disillusioned, frustrated and destructive. He only returned to it in the 1980s. Some of this later work took on a softer palette: in “Store Opening Flowers” (1991), a large, almost perfectly round bouquet sits propped up high on a street, partly covered as if in a shroud. While still imbued with Moriyama’s aura of grimy beauty, there’s a stillness and clarity here, gentler greys and paler gradients.

Moriyama has said that for him, the three central elements of photography are documentation, memory and commemoration. Time, he reflects, has the capacity to erase memory altogether. We will all be unable to remember scenes, instances, shots taken many years ago. So the power of the photograph then is in the act of restoration, its ability to drag a moment out of the past and present it to you seemingly anew, to ask: what do you think now?

‘Daido Moriyama: A Retrospective’ is at The Photographers’ Gallery in London until February 11

Follow @FTMag to find out about our latest stories first