Nへの手紙

by Daidō Moriyama

Daido Moriyama’s photobook “Letters to N” is a personal message from Moriyama to his good friend, the late Takuma Nakahira. Shot with a digital camera in the Shonan region, including the towns of Kamakura, Zushi, and Hayama, Moriyama drafts a visual letter composed of everyday scenes in black and white to his dear companion.
The book includes an afterword by Moriyama and a series of letters to Takuma written thirty years ago, after Takuma suffered a loss of memory, and originally published in a literary magazine (all text included in Japanese & in English translation).

“I know you love the summer, so I wonder, are you still visiting Zushi and the beach there? Are you still chasing fish around the cliffs at Hayama? When you’re in the water, to me you almost looked like a fish yourself. Are you still spending time at the sea where we used to go for a dive almost every day?”
― from Daido Moriyama’s letter to Nakahira from January 1988

Paperback

About the author

Daidō Moriyama (Japanese: 森山 大道, Hepburn: Moriyama Daidō, born October 10, 1938) is a Japanese photographer best known for his black-and-white street photography and association with the avant-garde photography magazine Provoke.

Moriyama began his career as an assistant to photographer Eikoh Hosoe, a co-founder of the avant-garde photo cooperative Vivo, and made his mark with his first photobook Japan: A Photo Theater, published in 1968. His formative work in the 1960s boldly captured the darker qualities of urban life in postwar Japan in rough, unfettered fashion, filtering the rawness of human experience through sharply tilted angles, grained textures, harsh contrast, and blurred movements through the photographer's wandering gaze. Many of his well-known works from the 1960s and 1970s are read through the lenses of post-war reconstruction and post-Occupation cultural upheaval.

Moriyama continued to experiment with the representative possibilities offered by the camera in his 1969 Accident series, which was serialized over one year in the photo magazine Asahi Camera, in which he deployed his camera as a copying machine to reproduce existing media images. His 1972 photobook Farewell Photography, which was accompanied by an interview with his fellow Provoke photographer Takuma Nakahira, presents his radical effort to dismantle the medium.

Although the photobook is a favored format of presentation among Japanese photographers, Moriyama was particularly prolific: he has produced more than 150 photobooks since 1968.