RECORD NO.27

Record #27

by Daidō Moriyama (photographer)

"These photos were taken from what I'd rather describe as "a promenader's view". "Daido Moriyama (Experts from the original text of Record No.27)”That's because it surely is easy to release the shutter button and take pictures, but that consious sense of distance that hovers in the space between the photographer and the photographed always contains some severe and delicate issues beyond imagination.” -DAIDO MORIYAMA (Experts from the original text of Record No.27) The photos included in ”RECORD : No.27"are all taken in Hong Kong in March 2014. This is the first issue of RECORD series with the mixture of Color and Monochrome photos. The images here contains the symbolic monochromatic vision and the worldly visions in color.And then the TV screen of anti government activists flooding all around the city and the streets where he also walked and snapped the photos. " I have no choice but to think once again about myselfm about photography, about the world, about the stance of photographing things, and about the significance of snapshots."Daidō Moriyama (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”.

Kindle Edition

Published November 4, 2014

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.