RECORD NO.12

Record #12

by Daidō Moriyama (photographer)

It goes without saying that every photograph is a copy of reality, and a fake depiction of the world, incorporating notions of realism and actuality. Henri Bergson once said something along the lines of, “The whole world has already been depicted down to the last inch,” and from the perspective of my daily routine working with the camera, I would second that claim. The infinity recorded by the camera is of course a Moebius strip. The eyes of countless human beings have in fact been observing/depicting the world, continuously and interminably producing a copy of it since prehistoric times. This procedure, totally bare of originality, is exactly where the only strength of photography lies.For us street photographers there is no other option but to buzz around things like flies and see where we can scrounge something.-DAIDO MORIYAMADaidō Moriyama (Moriyama Daidō, born October 10, 1938) is a Japanese photographer noted for his images depicting the breakdown of traditional values in post-war Japan.Born in Ikeda, Osaka, Daidō Moriyama studied photography under Takeji Iwamiya before moving to Tokyo in 1961 to work as an assistant to Eikoh Hosoe. He produced a collection of photographs, on "Nippon gekijō shashinchō" Though not exclusively, Moriyama predominantly takes high contrast, grainy, black and white photographs within the Shinjuku area of Tokyo, often shot from odd angles. Moriyama's photography has been influenced by Seiryū Inoue, Shōmei Tōmatsu, William Klein, Andy Warhol, Eikoh Hosoe, the Japanese writer Yukio Mishima, the dramatist Shūji Terayama, and Jack Kerouac's "On the Road".Plexus Co.,Ltd.(Tokyo, Japan) proudly presents Daido Moriyama's lifework series "RECORD" in e-Book for the first time distributing in worldwide scale.

52 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 8, 2009

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.