Labyrinth: Daido Moriyama

by Daidō Moriyama (Photographer)

「本作でのコンタクトシートの再構築に際して、否応なくこれまでに撮影したフィルム全てを見返すこととなった。」
フィルムを見返すことは、同時に自身の写真家としての道のりを振り返ること。森山自身が再構築した1 枚のシートのなかには、60年代から 2000年代までのネガが詰まっている。完成後、その過程を振り返り、本作を自身で「LABYRINTH( 迷宮 )」と命名した。
1 つ 1 つのカットが連なっているからこそ、生まれる動きやリズム。視線や垣間見える思考。名作と知られる作品の前後のカットだけではなく、シャッターを押す行為そのものの本質に迫る。

『LABYRINTH』は森山大道自身が再構築したネガをもとに、コンタクトシートを作成しており、今回の電子化に伴い、新たに未収録の約3,000 カットを完全掲載しています。
監修：森山大道写真財団
協力：Akio Nagasawa Publishing, 森山大道写真財団

“I had to go through my entire film archive one by one to reconstruct the contact print for this book” Daido Moriyama
LABYRINTH -Complete Edition- reveals more than 3,000 shots of unseen photos, which was not printed on the original version of the book. The negative film of each page was precisly selected and aligned by Daido Moriyama himself and was printed as a Contact Sheet.

Plexus is proudly presenting LABYRINTH -Complete Edition- by re-scanning the entire 300 contact sheets with a High-Resolution scanner and calibrate each pages one by one to maximize the visual impact, and to reveal the essence of Daido Moriyama's original purpose.

Supervised by Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation
Akio Nagasawa Publishing, Moriyama Daido Photo Foundation

Genres: Photography, Art

304 pages, Paperback

First published September 28, 2012

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.

Reviews

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful but difficult book to read, with every page consisting entirely of contact sheets--a couple dozen photographs over every 2-page spread, lay out horizontally, vertically, some upside down: it's like being in a darkened room at 3 in the morning, channel surfing an old B&W TV. Because the contact sheets are set out a-chronically, there's no development to Moriyama's career to note, only a set of obsessions: high-contrast B&W, the erotic lines of women's bodies, night life and day life in the city, and urban effluvia. The book's layout suggests the book's intention(s)--whatever it might be--isn't in the single image--you'd need a magnifying glass to do that; instead, something is being said in the cumulative aesthetic effect--which is at least that Moriyama is a *working* photographer.

[el · Rating 3 out of 5]

Beautiful photos probably, but it's a big book of negatives, which I didn't care for. I wanted to see them in their full size.