Last November I went to New York for the first time in two years. That was for an event in the rather big gallery space complete with library and café of the Aperture photo publisher in Manhattan's Chelsea gallery district. In the "TKY" titled show, I made photobooks containing about 100 of my prints, and handed them directly to the numerous visitors who had come to receive their reserved copies. The venue was packed with lots of New Yorkers, among them my friends Gerard Malanga and Larry Clark. After doing this for two busy yet very pleasant days, I took some time off for a trip to Coney Island, where I enjoyed an enormously colorful, American-flavored afternoon. However the real thrill came later in the evening, when I took a dive into the Times Square's billboard jungle. The adrenalin rush the experience of bathing in the sparkling beams of light gave me made this the sexiest moment of my stay in New York. I’ll be back in New York this coming May, and you will surely see me heading straight for the entrancing lights like an insect once again. -DAIDO MORIYAMA
Daidō 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.
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.